Two families, one home, one young curious inventive child. Individual does not clutter everywhere. Overly clean-oriented in some areas (e.g., kitchen). Overly clutterish in some places in the main living areas. Own private space is horrifying. Own private space now includes entire guest room and 80% of the basement, with no stopping in sight. Acquisitions are largely as to volume clothing (likely has more in this house right now than my SO and I have owned in total over our entire lives). More arrives with every trip to Goodwill. Bags of it. There are two other areas where purchased items arrive constantly, without any apparent pattern. Extensive late-night Internet quests for information and items. These are not cheap items and are at the purchase level where I suspect it's a substantial financial burden and could be cast as a wastage of marital assets. Other than the stress on everyone else in the house, some of this stuff is potentially dangerous through being sharp. If these were knives, for example, there would be random boxes of them all over, with sharp points sticking out. The other category is inherently deadly. This is sort of handled by one security cabinet, but it's never locked. The child is simply expected not to go into the area of the house where these two kinds of items are. That seems to be nonsense to me.

I believe this behavior and some other things are pushing that marriage to the very edge, and that this and other behaviors are getting up to the point of presenting a danger to at least the child. I suspect that the individual either will not or cannot accept that the behavior is way out of line.

Yeah, there's other clutter, too. Unopened inherited boxes that have been moved from here to there. Stacks of beer going stale. Precious furniture that uses up space that used to be useful.

Are the posts/suggestions on hoarders worth reading and dealing with? Or is this excessive acquisition part of some other thing to look into?

At this point, I'm pretty much over it, and started organizing one "collection." Turns out it's worse than I thought. Must be $10,000 worth of stuff that looks to have been acquired mostly over the last 2 years.

Suggestions?