Comments (43)

1. I remember on somethingawful there was a guy who’s mother hoarded e-bay items. She literally had boxes and boxes of unopened e-bay goodies that she would buy and then never use. The house was so congested with boxes that there was usually only room to walk from point A to B with very little wiggle room.

   posted by chris on 9-24-2008 at 9:14 am

2. A friend of mine owns a Trailer in La Porte, Texas. A tree fell into her trailer during Hurricane Ike, water damage, leaves everywhere, her home and everything in it is a total loss.

   Does that count?

   posted by Witty Nickname on 9-24-2008 at 9:14 am

3. As something of a neat freak, I’ve never really lived in a messy place. Even my college dorm room was close to spotless (mostly because I picked up after my slobbish roommate).

   It’s gotten to the point where in order to consider seriously dating someone, I have to see their apartment/house/place of residence. I can handle a little clutter because I know not everyone is as persnickety as I am, but if I see anything resembling filth (rotting food, fast food wrappers on the floor, bugs, etc.) I can’t escape fast enough. Walking into one of the places above would probably cause me to spontaneously combust.

   posted by dying alive on 9-24-2008 at 9:26 am

4. I work for an environmental consulting firm. We were going through a slow period so my boss was picking up any job he could to keep us employed. Health department called one day for assistance in cleaning up a house. Woman who lived there had some mental issues, ate nothing but pizza and drank only soda. There were about 5 years of pizza boxes soda bottles piled up in her house. The real clincher, the plumbing stopped working about three years prior to our arrival. Anything and everything was used as a toilet. Her family showed up midway through our decontamination, they were conviced she had money hidden in the house, and accused us of taking it. We never found any money, of course we weren’t looking too hard! My question is, where was the family while all of this was going on. Sad! It did take me a while before I could eat pizza again! Most disgusting thing I ever had to do!

   posted by Cphall32 on 9-24-2008 at 9:38 am

5. I used to live in an apartment building where one of the tenants decided not to train her dogs to go potty outside. She also decided not to clean up after her dogs. She received many complaints and was soon evicted. I did not see the apartment, but from what I hear, she also didn’t take out the trash. I hope that her dogs found a new, clean home.

   posted by lmborgmeyer on 9-24-2008 at 9:47 am

6. I haven’t been to my friend’s parents’ house since atleast 4 years ago, but her mother makes small doll houses and hangs them on the walls. Most are completely covered in furry mounds of dust, every available table or counter space or shelf is covered in knickknacks and dust, anywhere there is not a doll house on the wall, there is some other type of filthy decoration. The worst part is that the bathroom ceiling is compltetely covered in black mold and all the sea shells and soaps and decorations in the bathroom are covered in piles of dust and dirt. Absolutely disgusting, I don’t know how they are breathing in that place.

   posted by Brittany on 9-24-2008 at 10:45 am

7. i went to a friend’s house in high school and there was a lawn mower on the sofa.

   posted by kat on 9-24-2008 at 11:41 am

8. Let me tell you the saga of Jim and Dave.

   Jim and Dave were a couple of roommates of mine. We rented a 3BR/2BA two story townhouse. Jim and I took the upstairs bedrooms and shared the bathroom. We let Dave have the downstairs bedroom with his own bath.

   Almost as soon as we moved in, Dave got fired from his job. He had plenty of money for rent and such, but not enough for going out to eat, so he made a lot of meals in the kitchen. However, Dave’s logic went like this: I pay 1/3 of the rent, therefore, I should only have to clean 1/3 of the mess (regardless of the fact that he made probably 90% of it). Jim however, pretty much ate three meals a day at Burger King. The trash can under the sink was soon overflowing with BK bags and scraps and whatever detritus was left from Dave’s meals (I had quickly taken to eating at my GF’s place as they had no problem consuming all groceries in the house). This mess rapidly attracted mice. I demanded a thorough cleaning and traps to get rid of the mice. Jim, the softy, suggested that instead of killing the mice, we should just leave food under the sink so they wouldn’t feel the need to invade the rest of the house.

   Instead of pointing out that this would only result in MORE MICE, I immediately began formulating my escape plan (I asked my girlfriend to marry me). When my plan came to fruition, Jim and I decided to clean the apartment to try and get the security deposit back. Dave, however, just packed his stuff and left, leaving us to clean his room and bathroom. We had never gone in his bathroom until that point. When we did, all that remained of Dave was a copy of Playboy (the Shannen Doherty issue) and two clean spots the exact size and shape of Dave’s feet in the otherwise completely black tub bottom.

   Also, Jim, a budding auteur, decided to shoot a horror movie in our apartment. One scene involved releasing hundreds, possibly thousands, of ants in the upstairs bathroom and having his starlet stomp on them.

   Longest six months of my life…

   posted by Anthony on 9-24-2008 at 12:02 pm

9. I think I recognize those cups as being from Whataburger, some of the most disgusting fast food available.

   posted by Johnny Cat on 9-24-2008 at 12:03 pm

10. My mom was a Realtor, and she was selling a house for a man whose father had died. The old man was blind, but also a fanatic porn collector. There were literally trails in the porn cassettes, and calendars from the 80s wallpapering the walls. Insane. Never seen sooo much porn in my life.

    posted by Kristyn on 9-24-2008 at 12:37 pm

11. I saw another truly disgusting house when I worked for builder. Years earlier, he had rented out a house he couldn’t sell. When the tenant finally moved out, one of our building superintendants went in and took some pictures. They had several large dogs that they kept inside, and the dogs had pooped and peed everywhere. They peed on the walls so much that the sheetrock had to be removed. The carpet and pad had to be removed as well, but the stink remained so much that they had to bleach the concrete slab.

    The most vivid illustration of the filth was a picture the superintendent took of the living room. In the corner was a perfect circle of cleanliness with a mound of refuse around it. I couldn’t figure out what that was, so I asked him. He said that the renters had owned a large bird (parrot or something), and that circle was where the base of the cage had rested. It had never been moved since they moved in. The mound around it was everything the bird had tossed out of it’s cage.

    posted by Anthony on 9-24-2008 at 12:43 pm

12. My friend’s Aunt was a hoarder. When I was a kid, she asked me to stay for dinner and I needed to call my mom. I asked where the phone was. “It’s on the piano.” I couldn’t find the grand piano in the room. She had things piled high from floor to ceiling in every room – even the kitchen. We needed to eat in shifts as only two of us could fit at the table at any given time.

    posted by Emily on 9-24-2008 at 12:49 pm

13. I dated a girl who’s family were hoarders. 90% of of floor space in their small rancher-style house was filled with stacked up newspapers and books.

    My friend’s apartment was terrible, cigarette butts and beer bottles everywhere, trash cans overflowing, chicken bones on the carpet, nowhere to sit. He used to invite me to crash there when we’d been out drinking, but I didn’t want to lay my head down on the couch.

    posted by dan1101 on 9-24-2008 at 1:49 pm

14. I know this pales in comparison to some of the other stories, but here’s a snapshot into what the home of one of my relatives was like: She was cleaning off her dresser and found a TV set that she didn’t even know was there. She searched her memory and talked to other family members and they estimate the TV had been put there some 15 years before….

    posted by Michigan Mom on 9-24-2008 at 2:21 pm

15. Oh this just creeps me out. My whole body is tense and I feel ill.

    My entire family will spend the rest of the day cleaning. I feel the need to be in a totally bleached environment.

    posted by Karen on 9-24-2008 at 2:29 pm

16. I second that Karen! I’m picturing myself hands and knees in my bathroom after work scrubbing away!

    All of this reminds me of when I was still in elementary school and my great grandmother had died. She herself was not a clean old lady, and the house already smelled of old pee. After the funeral, one of my cousins moved into the house. About three months later, my aunt went into the house and found all of the food from after the funeral still in the trays on the kitchen table, now covered in rat feces. The floor was covered in filth and dog poo except for a little clean path my cousin apparently made that went from the front door to her bedroom. She was promptly kicked out and it took my mother and aunts almost a week to clean everything.

    posted by slwarren26 on 9-24-2008 at 2:43 pm

17. I had complete slobs when I was a college senior. I have never been known as a clean freak but I would have to clean up every few weeks to get to our dining room table. There would be stacks of junk/books,clothes outside each of their rooms after I was done. One roomie was known for leaving bowls of cereal milk laying about until we had that funky smell, plus I found a dead/decaying mouse under his coat that was piled in the corner.
    Glad I graduated and left that mess.

    posted by bucsfan on 9-24-2008 at 2:57 pm

18. When I was When I was a kid, my grandfather’s brother, “Uncle C” died. I don’t think anyone had realized just how bad his house was until the family began to clean the house out. He was a collector, and he had plenty of money, but he made frequent trips to the dump searching for “treasures.” These treasures, newspapers, filth and a million other things were piled high in every room. He had also never once in his life cleaned anything, so there were roaches everywhere. And I mean everywhere! Including generations and generations of dead ones in the walls and even in the never-used oven. After the house had been fumigated and every creepy-crawly thing killed, it still smelled like dead roaches. I was 5 then, so that was 24 years ago and yet I will never forget that smell.

    posted by KP on 9-24-2008 at 3:06 pm

19. This is not that bad either, but the worst house I’ve ever been in has to be my own parents’ house. I always call it a black hole because whenever I used to bring something home, it would literally disappear. My parents are packrats! Now that I live in my own place, my room has turned into storage for all the overflow of stuff that they don’t use but don’t want to get rid of. I can’t even walk in there anymore. I think the worst part is, I don’t think they’ve vacuumed in many, many years.. many years.

    posted by CK on 9-24-2008 at 3:11 pm

20. ah, cigarettes and What-a-Burger

    the secret to a long and healthy life

    ReCAPTCHA: “Hooker $10″ (I’d like to think I’d go for a little more $$ than that)

    posted by Laura on 9-24-2008 at 3:20 pm

21. I may not clean up after myself right away, but I would never let things get that bad!

    The worst place I was ever in was a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s. Her husband was in the Navy, and they lived on the base. She got herself two black lab puppies to keep herself company while he was out on tour. She let these dogs use the entire apartment as their toilet. There was feces all over the place, and newspapers on top of where they had peed. I won’t even talk about the flies that were everywhere. I heard that when her husband didn’t re-enlist, the Navy hit them with a huge bill to clean up the place. They had to almost gut the place to make it habitable again.

    posted by Amy D on 9-24-2008 at 3:39 pm

22. I was thinking about the most disgusting places I’ve ever seen (which are mostly on Dirty Jobs) but then Anthony reminded me of a former roommate. He was also a third in a 3br/1bath. The problem; he took completely massive dumps in the toilet that either wouldn’t flush (or if they did GIGANTIC streaks down the sides of the bowl). He never washed his towels so the bathroom smelled moldy even after I cleaned. He would buy gallons of milk then put the glasses/cereal bowls in the sink without rinsing.This was a very bad idea because we were living in a hot climate and every house had roaches. When we were moving out, he moved his couch down to the living room and the stench on it was so bad it would stick to your clothing when you stood up.

    posted by Diane on 9-24-2008 at 3:55 pm

23. I admit to being somewhat of a hoarder. No can of soda pop has ever entered my room and left within the same day and not all that many have left in the same week. An entire third of my desk is filled with pop cans. I do take things out when I run out of room, but there really isn’t any reason to do so before then.

    posted by S on 9-24-2008 at 4:10 pm

24. It’s stories like this that make me borderline minimalist. I’ve decorated my apartment, to be sure, but I hate useless knick-knacks. If I’m cleaning and come across something I haven’t thought of or missed in a year, it usually goes to the Salvation Army or finds a new path in life as a white elephant gift.

    The thought of all those roaches makes me gag!

    posted by andrea on 9-24-2008 at 4:34 pm

25. I had a friend who was a postdoc in physiology and she worked with lizards. Her entire house was full of lizard/iguana/turtle cages and the accoutrements for 3 cats. She and her husband never vacuumed and there were piles of clutter everywhere. The worst part, though, was that they got weekly shipments of crickets to feed the reptiles, and they could never figure out how to upend the cricket boxes into the cages without a dozen of them falling out onto the floor. So there were hundreds, maybe thousands of crickets all over the house. I thought I was going crazy the first time I went over there because I kept seeing things moving out of the corner of my eye, and then they’d be gone. We lost touch after they had a baby – there was no way I was going to be able to keep myself from grabbing the little girl and making a run for some sanitary conditions.

    posted by Krim on 9-24-2008 at 6:12 pm

26. The messiest I’ve been in? My own. (LOL)

    posted by Sally Villarreal on 9-24-2008 at 7:00 pm

27. I once had a lawyer who hoarded cats. He kept dozens in rental places and his office. The first time I visited a trailer he lived in, I had to go out on the porch just to breath. He’s dead now.

    Another guy, a friend of my husband’s, inherited his parents lovely home and never cleaned it. When we visited, I had to carry my children to the bathroom because there was broken glass on the floor. Things got worse, and I stopped taking the kids.

    He later broke a leg, and I would deliver dinner to him every other day or so. I would empty overflowing ashtrays and run the dishwasher, but there wasn’t much I could do with the clutter. There were stacks of magazines, stacks of newspapers, stacks of vodka bottles, etc etc. One night, he drank himself into a coma and dropped a cigarette. The entire house burned down, and his corpse was officially identified by his dental records. I was probably the last one to see him alive.

    posted by Miss Cellania on 9-24-2008 at 11:25 pm

28. When I was young, stupid and broke, I rented the top floor of a house whose owner lived in the basement. Every surface in the basement was covered with beer cans and cigarette butts. A few months after I moved in his dog had puppies, which he kept in the laundry room until they were old enough to be adopted. The laundry room floor was knee-deep in dirty clothes, and of course the puppies had to use the floor (and clothes) as their toilet. Needless to say, I quickly scrounged up the money to move.

    posted by Karen on 9-25-2008 at 7:18 am

29. I have 3 stories, one creepy, one sad, and one nasty.

    First of all I would like to state, my husband is very anal and OCD, we both like everything to be in order (and after 18 years, have decided to quit fighting over who’s order — kitchen is mine ONLY)

    His oldest sister lived in a small town. The sewer lines were starting to collapse, so the city decided to replace them. When they did, they released millions of roaches. That poor woman would spray bug spray, and the roaches would just keep on going. She tried everything to get rid of them, but they had moved into her walls. In the end, she had to burn her house to get rid of them. (normal tearing down would just let them loose) The fire was a controlled burn by the fire department, and she has a new house on that sight now. The few that got out of the fire in time were killed by Orkin.

    Before we were married we went to visit his grandmother. His father and his wife were supposed to be taking care of her, but they weren’t doing a very good job. When you first came in you couldn’t see, all the curtains were drawn and all but one lightbulb was blown. As she was showing me family pictures my husband started going through opening windows and replacing light bulbs (he had to go buy them). When we could see the house just broke your heart. I’ve never seen dust and nicotine so thick! Her pretty amber globes on her ceiling fan became clear when I washed them. We spent all day there cleaning her house, bought her food (none in the house), and visited. Monday morning (we had went on Sunday) we called an elder agency in her area (we didn’t live close) to have someone start checking on her. See, she was sick and wouldn’t let us take her to the hospital. Pneumonia, salmonella, and malnourished. She died in a week, her system was so destroyed the doctors couldn’t save her.

    Now for the gross one. Another one of his sisters. I’ve always said she was depressed and needed help, everyone said she just likes animals. Well, when she reached 60 cats in a 3 bedroom trailer, you could smell it walking up. We had cleaned her house and fixed the wiring (cats destroyed it) many times before she reached that peak. The last time he tried to rope me into cleaning it I refused, the smell was too strong. She couldn’t keep up on the litterboxes, so she had started using one of the bedrooms as a giant litterbox. Just pour more done when the top layer was dirty — you can imagine the smell. Due to the massive amounts of fur her furnace quit working and she was using a kerosene heater to heat her trailer. Yes, it burned, luckily, she wasn’t home when it happened. I know we found 10 corpses, 3 living, but the rest ran away. She went to stay with her mother until she could get a new house, and then her mom’s health got worse. Years later they’re still living together, but she is only allowed two cats in the house. (the 3 survivors were outdoor cats until they died). Now everyone is starting to worry about this sister, in the last few years she’s just seemed so depressed.

    posted by Lorelei on 9-25-2008 at 10:16 am

30. I grew up in a house that would have made this list. It was always infested with mice and roaches. There were so many roaches that when you flicked a light on in the kitchen, you’d hear the skittering sound of thousands of tiny feet. Growing up in it, I thought nothing of having to blow bugs off my food, though I did hate when one would get into my drink and catch me unawares.

    Our pets would drag trash all over the pool room (yep, we had a pool table, not that you could use it, because it was absolutely COVERED in clothes and canned goods, serving as a makeshift pantry, since the cabinets in the kitchen weren’t used. The pool room was essentially a giant litterbox.

    The bathroom downstairs had a toilet that overflowed on a regular basis, and before my mom finally pulled the carpet up in there, it would literally squish under your feet. The basement flooded, and often had at least a small amount of standing water.

    And one year we got fleas so bad that I ended up having to move out of my room to the basement. My room had shag carpeting, which fleas love apparently, and my flesh is also fleas preferred flavor. So when I would go to bed, I would wake up with tons of bites. I even tried sleeping in a hooded sweatshirt, covering everything but my face, but the fleas just bit my face.

    The house isn’t there anymore. My parents got evicted a few years ago, and about a year after that, there was a fire, and they eventually leveled the place because it wasn’t liveable. My apartment now is really messy because I don’t know how to clean, and my mom has the nerve to give me crap about it. But several years of therapy have helped at least the emotional aspects!

    posted by Angie on 9-25-2008 at 10:59 am

31. Can somebody please explain to me what that large brown smear on the wall is? (0:54 in the video).

    I feel the need to clean.

    posted by GTT on 9-25-2008 at 11:00 am

32. When I did food delivery there was a place with a woman who I believe had diabetes. She was huge and I don’t think she ever moved from the spot where she sat. The bad food and mutliple two liter sodas didn’t help her.
    The place had the sweet, putrid smell of rotting flesh. In the summer you could smell it from the street. After leaving there I wanted to burn my clothes and take a long shower.
    And she never tipped.

    posted by BassMan on 9-25-2008 at 11:10 am

33. in the video, does anyone else find the cleaning products by the sink kind of ironic?

    posted by the creature on 9-25-2008 at 12:23 pm

34. When my fiance and I were looking for apartments after moving to NJ, the real estate agent from his company brought us to this 2BR condo that was being rented out. It was disgusting. She opened the door and IMMEDIATELY you smelled animal. Cats, dogs, whatever. The carpets were dirty, there were animal cages in corners (empty). There was a mattress in one of the bedrooms with a sheet or two (very dirty), plus a few picture frames in the kitchen. It seriously looked like a family who couldn’t clean or take care of their animals suddenly up and left. Very odd.

    On top of it, they were asking for $1400 rent! I know it’s NJ, but really….

    posted by Kate on 2-9-2009 at 2:33 pm

35. I went to a friend of a friend’s house with a group of people one night, and I was amazed at what I saw. There were 8 teenagers living in the house, which (from what I gather) used to be nice. The living room had windows with broken glass (and the glass was strewn all over the floor and yard), the carpet was stained with all manner of colors, and the couch looked like it had been pulled out of a mud pit or something. The kitchen floor was barely visible due to the buildup of trash and just random junk (lamps, boxes of stuff). No countertop space was visible because there were so many dirty dishes, and the sink was stacked high with dirty plates. The one bedroom I saw was dusty and again, I couldn’t tell what color the carpet was supposed to be. There were cigarette ashes everywhere. And ontop of this, they had just recently gotten two puppies (who I wanted to take home with me so they wouldn’t have to live in that). Their source of food was a large bag of dogfood that they had knocked over and torn into, scattering the food all over the place. While we were there, one of the puppies peed in the floor, which I told the owner about and she said “Oh, it happens.” Didn’t even bother to clean it up…she just let it soak into the carpet. I truly do not understand how people can live like that!

    posted by Katie on 2-10-2009 at 12:53 am

36. My Grandmother was a young girl during the depression, so I think that led to her hoarding things. No one could help her clean because she saved everything, even reusing aluminum foil. She died in Sept. of 2006. My uncle inherited her house since he had never lived anywhere else. He is just as bad of a hoarder. The outside of the house is littered from one end to the other with old tools and other rusted out junk. Inside there are magazines, books and VHS tapes piled to the ceiling. He owns two milk cows so he keeps gallon milk jugs, there has to be at least 50 jugs in the kitchen at any given time. The only source of water in the bathroom is the bathtub, the toilet is not even hooked up since he attempted to renovate the room. He has never gotten rid of anything that both of my Grandparents owned. I heard of bachelors having a somewhat messy pad, but his goes beyond that. Trust me I’m no queen of clean, with 2 small children running around, but at least I try to do my best at making my house presentable.

    posted by G C P on 5-21-2009 at 1:54 pm

37. My very fastidious parents and I were invited to a Mardi Gras party at a university colleague’s place. To get into the main house you had to walk through the hosts’ bedroom with a barely made bed and a box of not-yet house trained puppies. This led to the kitchen where every surface and spice bottle was covered in decades old grease and dust. You couldn’t get to the buffet table in the dining room because musicians were sleeping off the previous night’s revelries… on the floor. Finally my parents took refuge in the sunroom which they thought would be safe… until they spied the bowl of oranges — decaying, oozing and black with mold. We bid our hosts “adieu” and made our way to the parade early, but that experience frequently come up in conversation!

    posted by N. Fritz on 12-9-2011 at 7:18 am

38. I used to work in a job that involved home visiting. I visited a home that the renter described as ‘infested with mices.’ It was. By ‘mices’ she meant tons and tons of mice. I just had to ask, ‘I’ve been here several times and haven’t seen any sign of mice, how bad is it?’
    She said when she opens the door to look downstairs, it looks like the basement floor is moving. I get the chills just thinking about it!
    Also visited a trailer where the family thought it was a good idea to have a pet rabbit. The rabbit was losing its hair because the daughter wouldn’t stop petting it, and there were rabbit droppings all over the place. They DID NOT own a vaccuum…

    posted by Cathy on 12-9-2011 at 10:04 am

39. My grandmother was a professional maid for most of my childhood. Two houses she cleaned were really bad–in one, the people were slobs who left their food, clothes, dirty dishes, etc, on every available surface because they knew my grandmother would be there to clean. We went twice a week and stayed all day (from 9-5) and my grandmother usually only took a 15 minute lunch–and we never made a dent. Worst still, whatever she did manage to clean reverted back to its original state after we left. When I got old enough, I started helping her, but even then nothing was accomplished.

    The other house she cleaned for free, because she was friends with the old lady who owned it. The lady had been a professional ballerina in her day, and her feet were so twisted that she could no longer get out of bed by the time I knew her. She had a MILLION cats. Literally. Every time we went there, we found a dead one. Or two. There was fur caked on the floor about two inches thick (I know, because after she died I scrubbed it myself, with grandma, mom and a cousin). The house reeked–cat urine, feces, and the general stench of death and decay. One day, my grandmother had my and my boy cousin with her, and she wanted us to come in and say “hi” to the old lady. My cousin summed up my feelings exactly: “I’d rather kiss a toilet seat.” We were ten, and it seemed like good logic to us. :D

    I, by contrast, could never claim to be the neatest person in the world, but I admit I develop a twitch if the dishes stack up in the sink, or if the clutter gets… well, too cluttered. I don’t mind work related stuff if it’s current–but just piles of papers and stuff for the heck of it drives me up the wall. And my pet peeve is leaving old food on dishes–it’s not that hard to throw it in the garbage can and rinse the plate! Yowza!

    posted by Heather on 12-9-2011 at 11:08 am

40. My sister had an untreated mental illness for about 20 years when she was a young mother. Her house was the typical “hoarders” type and it lacked deep-cleaning. Nothing that was outright horrifying (like the pictures above) but it was just sort of gross. There was always this SMELL that I couldn’t quite identify.

    I became a parent in my mid-30s when her kids were older. She came to visit and laughed when I changed the diaper. Because I had a boy I put a diaper over his naked genitals while I cleaned him up to stop any fountains of pee.

    She said, “I did that a couple of times but it became too hard and I stopped bothering.”

    I was confused, “What? It’s harder to put a diaper over him than clean pee off the ceiling?”

    She rolled her eyes and that’s when I realized that she DIDN’T clean it up. So that’s what that strange smell was: the smell of SIX baby boys’ pee that had been spattered all over those rooms and never cleaned up.

    To this day that it makes my skin crawl that I SAT DOWN in her house.

    posted by Missy on 12-9-2011 at 11:38 am

41. I was a caregiver for two 93-year-old twins that lived together in a decent-sized home. Absolutely every surface – tables, ledges, cabinets in their home was covered in knick-knacks of the china/plastic/wood variety. It took me hours and hours and hours to dust a single room. This was before the miracle of Swiffer! I now hate to dust, and I hate knick-knacks even more – we call them “dustables” in our house.

    My family grew up on the poor side, so me and all my sisters tend to hoard food. I’m probably the best at letting go, but my elder sister is not. I refuse to eat salad at her home because her salad dressing tends to be several years past the stale date! I pre-sniff any and all food before eating there.

    posted by Mare on 12-9-2011 at 1:15 pm

42. A couple who were friends of my former roommate rescued cats, and apparently just kept them. They had 19 cats … in a studio apartment. They had four litterboxes with a couple of handfuls of litter in each one. The cats, needless to say, found this arrangement disgusting, and used, well, everything else. Like the couple’s bed. They just dumped off the resulting crap and went to bed. When they left, my roomie and I got hired to clean the place. Even after we sanded as much as we dared off the hardwood floor, we couldn’t get rid of the smell, let alone the stains. It finally took some dark walnut stain to hide the discoloration and multiple coats of sealer to seal in the stench.

    Then there’s the house that was owned by a book dealer who went senile. She started with bookcases lining all the walls. Okay, that’s normal. Then she started stacking books in front of the bookcases. That wasn’t so good. Then she filled the whole place with books, leaving narrow aisles. Definitely going a bit batty there. In the end, she filled in the aisles and threw bags of books — no longer rare books, but any random junk from bag day at the library book sale — in on top. I’ve seen the pictures. The house was literally filled over five feet deep with books; the person who took the pictures was ON TOP of the layer of books. The floors had buckled from the weight. And, the worst thing is, there were several outbuildings on the property that were ALSO crammed to the roofs with books.

    I briefly had a job cleaning apartments in a college town. In one — not one of the ones my team was assigned to, thankfully, but we all went down to that unit to take a look — a couple of students decided they weren’t going to get their deposit back anyway, so they had nothing left to lose. They partied. Every possible bodily fluid was in the carpets, on the walls, etc. I’m not sure what was worse, the identifiable … stuff … or the unidentifiable stuff. And they smashed the furniture (furnished apartment) by slamming it into the walls. I do wonder what their parents said when they got the bill for damages. Among other things, the crew that was assigned to that apartment refused to clean it; some things are not worth minimum wage.

    Oh, in case anyone needs to know how to un-box crickets without losing dozens of them: You empty the box inside a trash bag, then pour the bag full of crickets into your cage (which, if you line the bottom with cheap oatmeal, doesn’t smell), first discarding anything you don’t want to keep (usually chunks of potato they put in for shipping). Neat, tidy, and no escaping crix.

    posted by Worldwalker on 12-9-2011 at 10:31 pm

43. I work as an EMT so I see the insides of all kinds of houses. Let me just say that I keep a bottle of disinfectant and bed bug spray in my car.

    posted by EMT For Hire on 12-10-2011 at 6:41 pm

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