ROBBINSDALE, Minn. - Sometimes there's a point when it all becomes too much.
"For the longest time I couldn't even go down and deal with his room, his room downstairs," said Deb Bishop.
'His room,' is her husband Curt's, who died three years ago after battling cancer.
His room hasn't been touched since his death and the thing is, neither has much of anything else in Deb Bishop's home.
"Hoarders tend to hide it and the joke is that nobody had been in this house for the last 18 years, that's pretty much true except for a couple of service people," Bishop said. "My family's all out of state."
Looking around the house, if there's a bag, it's filled. A box? It's packed. A shelf? It's occupied. And if there's a floor, in some rooms you can't even tell.
"House blindness. If it's been there long enough it isn't there," said Bishop as she reads the headline from a newspaper printed in 1987 that she still has.
Deb knew she had to do something; she just didn't know where to start, until a co-worker put a postcard on her chair about a company that helps to sort, toss and pack all sorts of stuff.
"We act as the catalyst to say, 'we're here to work with you, to work alongside you, to tell you that it's okay to let go of these things,'" explained Jodi Laliberte.
Laliberte and her business partner Katherine Francis are realtors turned cleaners and shop owners.
The pair found more and more people are in need of help when it comes to all of the clutter that can accumulate in their lives.
Their company, Odds and Ends Again, helps homeowners clean things up and what doesn't get tossed gets saved or sold.
"Moving forward, baby steps, although some days when the team is here," smiled Bishop. "It's more than baby steps. Its leaps, we're leaping over hurdles."
The next hurdle is to move out.
The team will also help Deb list and sell the home, while she moves into an apartment, now that a house is just too much for one person.
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