Comments on: No Place Like Home: Truly Disgusting Houses

By: EMT For Hire

EMT For Hire — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 23:41:33 +0000

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.

By: Worldwalker

Worldwalker — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 03:31:59 +0000

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.

By: Mare

Mare — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 18:15:03 +0000

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.

By: Missy

Missy — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:38:16 +0000

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.

By: Heather

Heather — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:08:08 +0000

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!

By: Cathy

Cathy — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:04:27 +0000

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…

By: N. Fritz

N. Fritz — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:18:38 +0000

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!

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….