Oh, God, BillD, you remind me painfully of my mother. Now, there was a world-class packrat. After she died, I spent literally weeks clearing out the cellar and under-eaves boxrooms (nine of them!) of my parents' house, which were crammed with:

pickle jars, paint cans, stacks of magazines, heaps of newspapers clothing fashionable 15 to 50 years in the past, five old flock mattresses in three different sizes, boxes of spools, boxes of doorknobs, boxes of porcelain junction boxes, stacks of lumber scraps, obsolete storm windows, two porcelain industrial laundry sinks, a couple of dozen miscellaneous kitchen chairs, several incomplete sets of dishes, three generations' worth of hand tools (most of them broken), a dead refrigerator, a moribund kitchen range, dozens of filthy old butter boxes full of bundled letters and financial records, about half a ton of coal dating from before installation of the oil furnace, and the sawn-up trunks of three Manitoba maple trees.

I was a basically tidy person when I started the job, and a confirmed neatnik when I finished. On the other hand, I could write a song about it, with a chorus like Killigrews' Soiree:

There was birch rind, tar twine, cherry wine and turpentine,
Jowls and cavalances, ginger beer and tea;
Pig's feet, cats' meat, dumplings boiled up in a sheet;
I tell ya boys, we had a treat, at Killigrews' soiree!