Comments on: No Place Like Home: Truly Disgusting Houses

By: G C P

G C P — Thu, 21 May 2009 17:54:00 +0000

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.

By: Katie

Katie — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:53:00 +0000

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!

By: Kate

Kate — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:33:00 +0000

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….

By: the creature

the creature — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:23:40 +0000

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

By: BassMan

BassMan — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:10:57 +0000

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.

By: GTT

GTT — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Angie

Angie — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:59:57 +0000

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!

By: Lorelei

Lorelei — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:16:16 +0000

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.

By: Karen

Karen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:18:10 +0000

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.

By: Miss Cellania

Miss Cellania — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:25:55 +0000

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.