De-hoarding (properties) : At what point to draw the line?

Quick and dirty backstory. We moved across the country to help my partner's folks. It had the allure that we'd be able to do some homesteading on the property, which was purchased partly due to "cold war paranoia and was supposed to be like a preppers getaway if shizzat hit the fan (Covid being the only threat since they bought it years ago)."

I knew they were hoarders on the times we'd go and visit. My partner finally saw the wisdom of my words along with the pathing and stacks of...stuff for what it is and the inability to use their own bedrooms and other rooms. Main house.

It's been a year since we've been in the paranoid property and come August it'll be 2yrs. 75% of our things are still packed in boxes and we came from a 314sq ft studio apartment and we still can't get enough room for ourselves because the house we're in has been used as a garage/shop/closet/dumping ground for anything.

I'm driving myself crazy trying to use random crap they've kept around, but I've hit a point now that I don't care anymore. His folks are in their 70s. This property has been neglected for about 30yrs. There is a giant shop filled with stuff as well, which isn't usable either. Fencing is...might as well not exist. The one neighbor has been grazing the pastures al la carte for years w/o renting it (bc why pay or fix your own fences when they'll never now? We know now...)

We contacted some heavy duty machine auction places and got the response that this stuff is too old...it's been rotting in fields or worse. His dad won't allow a scrapper bc "he won't pay us for it." Not sure it would matter bc he won't remember, not a mean jab. He's losing it.

I see this place as a lost cause. We've no capital to finance their clean up. Services are not readily available or job opportunities outside of 1overpriced grocery store who can't keep employees. Everytime we gear up for a reasonable project, it's no the cost is too high.

If it's too much to maintain, it's time to let it go. I don't want waste my life cleaning up their mess. But what to do?

Anyone else out there with a similar situation?

Ps sorry if this is the wrong forum. I did a search, but didn't come across anything.

I can feel your frustration and that you''re reaching the end of your energy here.
There's a lot of unknowns here, but I'm imagining that the place you're describing would be interesting to many people interested in old stuff (there's definitely a few on
Permies!) One persons rubbish is another person's treasure etc.
First things first.  When you moved there what were your aspirations for the place?  Go back in your mind and does that still appeal?  If it does then you need to break the job down.
I understand that you are living in a second house, but that it is full of your partner's parents' stuff still?  I think that just getting your own space will make you feel better.  However you can, move everything that isn't yours somewhere else. Or at least reclaim a place to cook and eat, a place to sleep and a place to do stuff or relax, and move evereything else into the other rooms.  Then you have an oasis where you can get away from the task.
You've had a hard time the last year with Covid which will have made getting help and getting rid of stuff more difficult, I have to wonder whether you can see the wood for the trees, but have to say we're on the side of hoarders ourselves. I find it very difficult to get rid of manufactured articles.  I susoect you need an independent arbitrator as to what is worth money, what is useful and what is rubbish.  
You could post stuff up here and get some advice, maybe organise a 'farm sale' when the Covid climate is better.  If you can provide accomodation, then there are various ways of getting help in return for giving experience.
If the dream doesn't appeal, that of course is another matter, and you have to work out what you and your partner do want to do, and how to get there.  I suspect it will still involve getting his parents out of their place, since the situation for them geting older still remains.  There were a few posts about multi-generational homesteading here including older folk and children on Permies, if you look, which may have some advice on aging at home.

Start with your end plan, will you be getting the property? If so do you want to make money off the land? Or do you want somewhere to "play" while the main income is a traditional job? I ask because you need to work out if you want to live there (without the junk) at all? Or are you only there to help her parents in their old age. That also brings up another point, if you two are only really there to help then how long is that likely to be? She/her parents cannot really expect you to ruin the next 20 years of your life living in a tip.
Because none of the junk is yours and they are not your parents I fear there is not really a lot you can do. I would put my foot down on the house I was meant to be living in and an area of land that I wanted to use and say that it is either emptied by x date or I empty it and everything goes straight to the tip. Of course this is only possible if your partner stands with you to.

You have had some good comments above. It is not reasonable that you handicap your present and future happiness by effectively camping on top of their stuff for the next however many years. That needs to be a hard boundary for you personally I think, and other decisions flow from there.

Beyond that, I think you also need to plan out the future care of these old folks. You mention that he is getting forgetful, so I presume some Alzheimer's is at play. Are there other medical issues at play here? How do you see their care working out over the next 5, 10, 20 years? It sounds like care provision where they currently live is non-existent, so your options are either you look after them in situ or you find some other arrangement.

Just throwing some ideas around - would selling the property release enough funds to set them up in a smaller apartment nearer your main home? Allow them to keep their independence while they still can, without the burden of huge property to manage, and within easy reach of you guys?

Once they are no longer living in the property you have far more options for how you go about clearing it. Around here we have salvage businesses that specialise in house clearances. Exact details vary, but they make their money on the scarp/salvage/resale value of the house contents. They are commonly used for situations like this where people inherit property with accumulations of stuff and want to get it cleaned and tidied either to live in or sell.

To sell the property, you are probably going to have to clean it up.  If I were purchasing the property, I would demand a huge price cut for the reasons you have presented. As far as keeping it goes, my feeling is that if I had ownership, I would probably make the effort. If not ...not.

It sounds as if you are not in love with the location.  While there are numerous exceptions...others here do live near larger communities, my experience has been that to get the remoteness that is essential to me, I accept that I will have to drive 30 miles to reach a real grocery store.

I found a couple of threads that may (or not) be useful.

On aging:
https://permies.com/t/146023/aging-homesteader
https://permies.com/t/123410/permaculture-elderly

On clutter and decluttering:
https://permies.com/t/146946/ungarbage/Hoarding-saving
https://permies.com/t/97129/ungarbage/Clutter-madness-waste-balance
https://permies.com/t/150396/permaculture-home-care-cleaning/purity/De-Cluttering-life

And
https://permies.com/f/386/flea-market

I have been in a less extreme version of this very situation. Ten years of eldercare pretty much demolishes the productive center of your life if you don't have enough control to live your best life on the property where you do it.  It can vary between spouses, too: perhaps one bears more of the burden of care, leaving the other one more free to make money or whatever, subject to the limitations of geography.  After a decade of this, the impacts can be very disparate: life-destroying for one, merely burdensome for the other.  

One thing I do know: hoarders never relax control.  They won't do it, they don't want to do it, and they mostly can't do it.  

We still have one hoarded-to-the-rafters room years after taking possession. [edited to add: Plus two collapsed outbuildings full of stuff that were rubble piles when we got here, and need to be cleaned up with a front-end loader.]  Time, energy, money, trash disposal, capacity to endure exposure to allergens -- the costs of cleanup are at best dismaying, and at worst, prohibitive.  

This is all intensely personal and gets to core values: personal autonomy, obligation to family, willingness to initiate or endure confrontation, love, frustration, and so much more.  Nobody can advise  how to navigate all those shoals because nobody else can see them all or put accurate weights on the different ones in order to balance them up.  

In the end, it usually boils down to how much you're needed by your elders and whether their perception of that matches your own.  If they need you and they know it utterly, you have leverage to negotiate.  "This isn't working for us, and it's never going to work for us.  Unless you give us complete control to sort, sell, burn, or dispose of all the stuff in our dwelling and on such-and-so patch of land we need for our garden and pastures, we are out of here because we can't live here no matter how much you love us."  The trouble is, most hoarders are so unable to practice that level of detachment from their treasures, they will say "Fine, I never needed you anyway, bye" and then what do you do?  Worse yet, if they are emotionally manipulative people, they'll know full well that their own need will keep you from leaving.  More often, their denial (about needing you) will prevent them from feeling any urgency about your statement of what you need in the situation.    

In the end, the resource limits for cleaning up a property are, IMO, a non-issue if it's to be your home.  In the long run, you will chip away at it until it's done.  But that's only true if you're allowed to chip away.  If you can't start, you'll never finish.

In our situation, we just sucked it up and took the damage to our personal lives.  We ended up in possession of the property (more or less, like all things in life there are complicating details) and enough constraints on our options from the ten years we spent on eldercare that we're unlikely to ever go anywhere else.  In the end, it is a life, and I have lots of space to plant trees.

Thank everyone for your posts!

Moving things to room to room is probably what started their mess. I call it sh!t shuffling bc it's not cleaning then it has to be moved again...moving things from in the house we're in would require literally making a pile out in the yard, which is its own problems...I hadn't mentioned the vermin that have also enjoyed the piles of stuff...

We didn't have much of plan other than thinking "they're ready to clean up," and hooboy they were not. We can't even get the coop cleaned out right now, it's full of windows and we don't have a place to put them... someone would love them I'm sure. His mom wants a green house, "that's why she kept and got them." The house we're in has an attached greenhouse, kinda...they built it on top of a deck...it's leaning and the deck it's attached to is warping which runs the length of house. Another structure would only allow her to fill it to the brim with sh!t we don't want in the house and shouldn't be...

As far as "one man's trash, is another's treasure." For sure! However we're in a mountain valley. 2 hours for groceries or real services. Ain't no one wanting that to get to us. We don't even have a regular fridge right now, 2mini ones and a cooler is our fridges. Delivery is a problem.

The main house I mentioned, where his folks are living is in another city, 4hrs away (2 houses on this dirty property, the other one is where they stay when they come, which isn't often, not even a quarter of the year, but we weren't allowed to move their things from there where we could start clean...). We managed to get the stairs and hallways cleared-ish there, before we were chased out due to a granddaughter moving in for college, which was another problem we were just expected to deal with. Along with Covid...

I'm definitely not in love with the location. Frankly, I hate it. Even if we could get traditional jobs here (min wage at the grocery store), it'd never pay enough to actually live here bc cost of living is so damn high.

I have mentioned even if they do bite the bullet and sell it, we'd still have to clean it up or take whatever financial hit. The worse bit being, there is bulldozer thing overgrown with blackberries, which has value, but his dad doesn't remember if it works or what work it needed after it was parked. Useful? Definitely! He won't repair it, we can't find a mechanic willing to make the drive, yet we can't sell it.

It's like that for all kinds of things. Giant grinders? We got like 10, maybe not actually 10, but more than 5. How about a giant lathe? They had at one point equipment to move this stuff, it's all rotted, non working ...my partner is a smart guy, he's not a big mechanic guy. We talked about that, if he did go learn this stuff (he's just not into it), it'd just be adding more to the resentment bucket.

We're not getting anything as far I know house or land, it's supposed to pass to his sister, who apparently had no plans to clean this dump either, just the status quo of coming up when there is time to play...

I like the idea of the salvage business. At least that would get started on another avenue.

I'm sorry if this comes off as whiny. I'm a go get it done kind of gal, who while not a minimalist I tried not to have lots of extra stuff. Not afraid of hard work or getting dirty or using weird stuff for something completely different...I'm just tapped out without a real outlet. Thanks for listening., Sincerely.

It sounds as if you have decided on your course of action.  Best of luck!   And, let us know how it turns out.

Sounds like there is no upside in any of this for you. You don't get the property long term. You don't love the area. You have the burden of caring for them, and you can't pursue your own opportunities.  It also sounds like there are other family members around who could be doing some caring but aren't?

As mentioned above, it sounds like you have made your mind up and the real issue is you are seeking validation, and a way to manage the situation.

Firstly, your feelings on this are TOTALLY valid. You have been forced into a terrible mess (both figurative and in this case literal) without any control of the situation or a path to improve things, because you don't have the authority to actually get rid of the stuff.

So the next step is how do you start extricating yourselves from this mess.

1) Why do you feel responsible for clearing up the mess? You say that the profit of the property sales, or the property itself, is going to someone else. Sorting the mess is their issue.

2) You need to physically extract yourself. Give them a date when you are moving back home, in a month's time. Let everyone around know that it is happening, and don't budge on it. It isn't a negotiation. Put the burden on others to figure out a way forward. Sounds like the other family members need to step up and be more involved.

3) Make it clear that they are more than welcome to move closer to you. You can even help them identifying suitable properties. This by itself will sever the link between them and their stuff, and make EVERYTHING else easier.

I’ll apologize now if I sound like a jerk.

You need to protect your future and think about what is in this for you.  To invest yourself physically, mentally, emotionally in a property that is destined to belong to someone else is going to hurt you in the long run.  If I understand correctly, his parents aren’t living on the property in need of physical care.  

PLEASE look out for your own needs.  I have spent the last year basically recovering from the previous five years.  We had to clear out, sell houses for and take physical care of three parents.  I’ve spent a lot of time angry and exhausted and two of the three parents were mine.  I ended up in the hospital and nearly died because of not taking care of my own health.  I don’t want to seem dramatic but I hate the idea of this happening to someone else if it can be avoided.

Please be careful in this situation.  

In addition to the excellent advice in previous posts, I will add this: You are being treated badly. There is no good reason why you should put up with it. It's time to move on.

If you want to stick with it and you've got the patience, then I suggest an approach that avoids experiencing the overwhelm that you're probably dealing with.  

First, explore what avenues you have for advertising the stuff.  I live half an hour from a 200 person town in one direction and a 3000 person town in the other.  Not a huge buyer pool, plus I have no time for yard sales or taking stuff in town and I bet you don't either.  BUT there are swap groups on Facebook where items can be listed -- it's like online shopping!  When someone wants something you're offering, you can agree on a price and how whatever you're selling can be delivered or picked up.  You might have some other online opportunity -- bulletin boards, Craigs-list type of things.  Check them all out!

Second, pick one type of item and focus on that.  If it's windows, for instance (I think you mentioned windows in a coop?) then go around and gather all the windows on the property that need getting rid of, stack them somewhere out of the way, and then advertise only those windows.  People in my area are always looking for windows.  It's fashionable to build greenhouses and sunrooms using mismatched windows, so often a buyer will take every window anyone has for sale.  Once the windows are dealt with, pick something else.  Chairs, maybe.  Or shirts.  Be specific, don't be tempted to add different kinds of things!  Just pick one kind, gather it, then advertise it.

It is truly much easier to gather like items than try to go through everything all at once and separate the items into categories and then end up with fifty stacks of separated items.  Plus there are resellers who love it when items are pre-separated and available in bulk.  

One at a time will get 'er done!