The problem is that when you need niche books and order them through small local stores it can take months before you get them. Recently got an e-mail that a book I ordered almost a year ago was available for pickup. Not sure why it takes them this long.
Similarly I ordered a spare set of strings for my niche musical instrument through a local music store 4 months ago, have called them at least once a month and it still hasn't arrived. Ordered them online from a German store, it arrived within 5 days. The excuses I've heard are: 1. they forgot to add it to the order 2. they order from many different suppliers and depending on the volume they will "collect" more orders from customers for a single supplier to keep delivery costs down, and for suppliers of niche products this can take a while. 3. It might have arrived at their warehouse but not at the shop. As a musician with concerts planned you can't just keep waiting for spare strings, you need them then and there before the concert.
If you don't care about the possessions you could remove it quickly. The problem is that when you try to clean it, they want to evaluate every single item for if it should stay or not.
Throwing it all in garbage bags and then in the bin takes much shorter amount of time.
I just recently helped a buddy clean out his dead relatives hoarder house. The only real decisions were "consignment, charity, or dump?" It took us weeks. I'm sure if we threw a ton of money, people, and vehicles at it we could have done it quickly, but that's not your typical scenario.
The problem is having to make an item-by-item decision for thousands of items.
If the decision is just "dump", the problem become easy: you strip the house bare and throw it in a dumpster. There was a hoarder house near me that was cleaned out in a couple days that way - they parked a dumpster in the front yard, hired a couple guys to toss everything in the house in garbage bags and toss all the garbage bags in the dumpster, gutted it down to the studs, remodeled it, and sold it.
The trouble is it's hard to get the hoarder to agree to do that, that's part of the disorder over valuing items that are junk, and also depends on the severity of the hoard. Sometimes the intervention can happen before it's all rotted to junk and there is legitimately items worth selling or keeping in the mess and the person just needs help letting go of the volume of random crap.
I would not be surprised if they would be money ahead hiring someone to sort through all the "junk" and make the decisions. There likely are a lot of things that have value in the mix that got sent to the dump.
You don't need to throw money at people. When we first moved abroad we ended up in this exact situation with quite a lot of belongings that we mostly just wanted to get rid of. We posted on Craig's List (maybe Facebook would be the goto now a days?) and literally within 30 minutes there were people there with professional moving gear clearing with us and then organizing/moving everything out that we didn't want.
They regaled us with a tale of how they just got to the city and were looking forward to being able to furnish/populate their house, but it was obvious that they were just grabbing and selling everything as a career. No harm no foul though, as we just wanted stuff cleared out and it certainly ended up 'in circulation' for folks that could use it.
When time came for my incapacitated-by-stroke father to move after we sold the family house to his new apartment, he did exactly this:
> they want to evaluate every single item
I almost gave up on him and only resumed when he was literally crying for me to come back. Did not regret coming back.
When he died 5 years later, my poor mother needed WEEKS to throw away all the useless shit he had accumulated in his apartment. Then I did regret not being harsher on him, but he was mentally and physically ill.
To anyone reading this: You are not the only one being hurt when you are a hoarder. Let people help you.
I suspect that many hoarders know this deep down. But the effort required for them to change their own behaviour is so great that they, most likely unconsciously, dismiss the harm it does to others as a lesser evil.
The hoarder houses I've been part of cleaning also require ripping up and discarding the carpeting. Some walls could merely be repainted, some required that special paint for trapping decades of cigarette smoke, and some required replacing the sheetrock that had been damaged by unspayed pets "marking" the walls.
Similarly I ordered a spare set of strings for my niche musical instrument through a local music store 4 months ago, have called them at least once a month and it still hasn't arrived. Ordered them online from a German store, it arrived within 5 days. The excuses I've heard are: 1. they forgot to add it to the order 2. they order from many different suppliers and depending on the volume they will "collect" more orders from customers for a single supplier to keep delivery costs down, and for suppliers of niche products this can take a while. 3. It might have arrived at their warehouse but not at the shop. As a musician with concerts planned you can't just keep waiting for spare strings, you need them then and there before the concert.