What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen people hoard?
I just finished two months working on this show for “Oprah.” In that home, we removed 75 tons of trash, just under 3,000 handbags, just over 3,000 pairs of shoes, over 2,900 Beanie Babies and we [sent] over 400 large trash bags of clothes to Goodwill. When we started, there was less than 200 square feet of living space in the house. It was by far one of the most extreme cases I have ever seen. It took 3,000 men hours just to get the stuff out of the house. What’s the strangest question anyone’s asked you about clutter? “Why do I have to let go of my child’s umbilical cord that I have here in a Ziploc bag on my refrigerator door?” You’re known for giving out a lot of tough love on “Clean Sweep”… Usually the two main types of clutter I see people struggling with are the “I might need it one day clutter” and “memory clutter.” And so to get them to focus on what’s important, I do kind of talk pretty tough. It comes down to helping people to make a choice between the quantity of your stuff
