I got it done, so here is the best advice I can give:

• You may think it’s this one-time task, and then it’ll never get back to that state. Is that really realistic? Might be for some. But more common is that it’s deeply ingrained in the personality. A “decision” to be someone different will not work in that case. Might be subtle and thus undiagnosed mental problems, such as ADHD or trauma, or just habits, “lazyness” etc. Get on that, learn about yourself. Then you can make SLOW progress.
• Hands-on garbage: Don’t fiddle with little bags that you get one by one. Get a bunch of huge garbage bags ready and fill them. No recycling / separation (at least for now; feel free to sort through the bags later, like that’ll happen), just stuff in what is garbage. When something costs less than you make in 10 minutes and is not needed in the next 4 weeks, it’s garbage. Emotional value? Then not; that’s okay to keep in storage boxes somewhere for peace of mind. Instead of getting overwhelmed by the view, just think: I’ll fill this bag now.
• Hands-on boxing: Get several big boxes ready, don’t pick them up one by one. Fill with everything that you want to keep (for good reasons), but don’t need in the next 14 days. E. g. hair clipper, waffle maker, paperwork. Don’t get too caught up on sorting. Sometimes, it’s best to just fill the boxes. Tax forms from 2023 along with the waffle maker and birth certificate etc. Possibly label by “finding location”, which is fast and surprisingly helpful! But if it’s no hold-up, better to sort a little bit, e. g. boxes of “anything paper”, “electronics, cables and devices” etc.
• Hands-on means: Don’t pick up a box, realise that it has two home-baked cookies from Christmas in it and then wuss around with it through the apartment. Grab and stash.
• When the task is overwhelming, do something, and never underestimate the value of doing a little. For example, you are tired and didn’t get as much done as you wanted. It’s tempting to put it off until tomorrow. But instead, get a bag and fill it with garbage, then sleep with a clean conscience.

if you have alot you need to throw out, probably something like a removal service that you can dump all your trash in. I have parents that are hoarders, and we used a service similar “600-junk removal” twice. it was a battle fighting hoarders to get trash thrown out.

Op expect to fight your parents mentally and physically, because they wont want anything be thrown away.

even then we couldnt throw away junk to make much of a difference, because all of it was filled up again a few months later. i assume your parents have hoarded enough that pest can easily establish in the house too. A and E hoarders is the extreme end of hoarding, but the mental aspects of them fighting everyone is common even in lightly hoarder situations.

Garage sale! Fill a box for $10

Start small with determining a set of items to go through. Force a decision on those items beyond keeping them in their place.

Continue for each small stack of items.

Get some boxes. Mark them as trash. Start putting stuff in those boxes. After a sufficient amount of time has passed where everyone has had time to know what is in the boxes, dispose of them.

Wish I kmew, i’m slowly cleaning my room right now myself.

This guy’s channel is full of useful tips for cleaning, maybe play it in the background while you work or watch it while you take breathers during the process.

I like many of his titles like “cleaning is not intuitive” (the thumbnail looks like its about bathroom stuff but i think its a mix)

Be quite ruthless - most things made out of paper are trash and any clothes you haven’t worn in - idk, 3 weeks? 2 months? - they can be donated (or thrown away).

You can sort other objects into 3 boxes/bags/ categories:

• 1. “I use it regularly,” so i’m keeping this
• 2. "I can see myself using this in the future so i’ll decide later (seperate from the space being cleaned so you can decide at the end)
• 3. “toss/donate this” (trash tier)

If group 2 gets too big you will become more ruthless. If group 1 gets too big you might get a bit buddhist and move much of it to group 2.

Aint gonna be easy. Deciding what has to go won’t work. Maybe try reversed,: Everything has to go and (cherry) pick what to keep. But with a hoarder… It’s tough. Each and every item will be point of discussion.

I have a two rules that help me:

1. I never move between rooms of the house without carrying something back where it belongs. Every trip should make my house a tiny bit tidier.

2. When I pick up something random and it doesn’t obviously belong anywhere, I drop it into my “probably should give this away” bin.

When the “probably should give this away” bin fills, I’ll rescue one or two things I changed my mind about, and give the rest away to empty the bin.

And of course I create an official “place it belongs” for anything I rescue from the give-away bin. Sometimes the effort choosing a place for it is the little nudge I need to get rid of something.

12 month rule. If you haven’t used it in a year or forgot it exists, get rid of it. In the end, it’s just shit made in a factory somewhere and nothing special.

Get a box. A bunch of boxes. Walk to the first thing you see. Pick it up. Ask yourself two questions.

1. Have I used this in the past 5 years?

2. Will I use it in the next 5 years?

If you answered no, put it in the box.

Now repeat. Over and over and over. With every single item in the house.

When you’re done, take the boxes to goodwill.

Now do this same process every 5 years. And when you’re buying a new thing, ask yourself: "Do I really want this thing in my house, and add to the next roundup?

You may find you buy less things, just because your cleanup every 5 years takes too long.

I just had to deal with this. Moving two households from Alabama to Minnesota, with myself, my wife and her mother (all 3 of whom are pack rats) and more than 1 one way truck and a car hauler was not in the budget.

What I did was rent a storage unit just large enough to match the volume of the truck I was going to rent. Anything that could fit in the storage unit could be kept. Everything else had to go. Anticipating trouble, especially from my MIL, I divided the storage unit into halfs using gaffer’s tape and one half (me and my wife’s) was again divided into half with one section reserved for me and the other for my wife.

Me and my wife downsized fairly problem-free. I got down to about 10 plastic footlockers and let my wife have the rest of my section. Our half was full, but not horribly so even after the furniture we wanted to keep. My MIL however was another story.

She kept saying we were trying to force her to give away everything she owned. She calmed down and started downsizing seriously when we finally packed up her house to move it to the storage unit and we completely filled U-haul’s largest truck, Tetris Style, with not even enough room left for a rolled up poster, and my MIL still had another half truck’s worth of boxes that she had, till that point, claimed she couldn’t bear parting with. I put my foot down and told her that, while I was willing to make multiple trips (neither of them were comfortable with the idea of drive the U-Haul) she would have to pay the full cost of moving everything that wouldn’t fit into the 1st truck and estimated that it would cost an additional $4K per trip, all in. That got her.

We wound up renting a second storage unit for interim use as she decided what would go on the truck and what she would have to sell, give away or toss. I think we may have single-handedly crashed the second hand market in our old town with everything we three donated. In the end, it was noisy, stressful and there were times when my MIL didn’t want to talk to me or my wife, but we eventually got it down to a single truck, and 3 cars, but damn, were they packed.

If you’re moving, then set some firm boundaries: You will have 1 moving truck (or whatever you’re using) - if it won’t fit in the truck, you can’t keep it, full stop. If there’s something that won’t fit that you absolutely must keep, you’ve got to remove something else to make room for it.

Take it one room at a time, or even one quarter of a room at a time. Don’t cherry pick things to remove - just start at one end and remove everything. It either goes in the dumpster, or it goes in the truck, but it can’t stay in the house, and you’ve got to choose one. There’s no “We’ll decide on this later”.

If there’s things that’re valuable, you might want to sell them rather than throwing them away (or donate or whatever) but in that case you still have to make the decision when you get to it. If it goes in the ‘Donate’ pile, you can’t take it out later - otherwise, you’ll just be going back to it over and over again and making no progress.

Move. Source: me, getting ready to sell, moving in 3 months from a house we’ve been in for 17 years with 5 kids.

Full disclosure: we haven’t done it yet, but things become so much clearer along keep/toss lines once you’re up against the task of staging your home for sale.

I used to be somewhat of a hoarder and I found it helpful to ask myself things like “When have I used this past few years?” or “Would I even remember this thing if I got rid of it?” etc.

If you have stuff you never really look at or use and maybe never even think about until you find it again then why keep it?