Ferret Herder: Actually, most of my clients are people looking to make a change. Not necessarily hoarders, but people who are, for whatever reason, not motivated to clean or even tidy up. Landlords mostly have their regular cleaners, anyway. So mostly my clients are people who looked around one day and said “Enough.”
For instance, one client was a man whose wife had died a little over a year earlier. He was ready to start being social again, but that wasn’t really an option with the house looking the way it did. Another was a woman with four children who had CPS breathing down her neck. Not sure what you mean by “resident reactions,” unless you mean people who’ve been evicted, in which case, no.
Alice: In reverse order, yes, I’m vigilant about my own home. For one thing, it reflects well on me, and for another, cleaning is not a burden for me. Some people can get up every morning at 5am and work out.
I work alone.
As for embarrassing, if you mean individual items, very little fazes me, and I’ve never had a client go “OMG I can’t believe I left that there!” I find the occasional vibrator on a closet shelf or copy of Gigantic Asses in the bathroom, but I never comment (or change their placement). This is California, so I’ve had clients smoke up in front of me and then offer me some. (I have to say no; it would wreck my concentration.)
Okay, worst job. The one that was worst for me personally was so because it was the most frustrating.
Now, to tie in with Brynda’s second question, the owners, assuming it’s a squalor situation and not a basic mop-dust-sweep gig, are always there. It’s up to them how involved they want to get. Some of them would rather stay in another room, at least at first, with me trotting back at intervals to ask “Do you want to keep this?..Shall I take down the curtains?..Where does this belong?” Ideally, they start to relax and become active participants, and what that usually means is, they start sorting through their personal papers that I’ve brought to them because I never throw away a sheet of paper that has writing on it. Then they sort through clothes, toys, and so forth, deciding what can stay and what has to go.
The thing is, I can’t make people’s decisions for them. What I’m really doing is removing the ballast so that they’re free to make decisions. I take care of the physically taxing work of removing the general grot, which makes them feel far less overwhelmed, and that leaves them with the mental and emotional strength they need to deal with the tasks only they can do.
But if that mental and emotional strength can’t be uncovered by the sight of a gleaming, clean bathroom, there’s not much I can do. IANAPsychiatrist. The reason this usually works is because the client was amenable. They had to be, to look for my ad and call me.
Which brings me to the worst client. She had some kind of mental disorder, I’m fairly certain, and in fact, it wasn’t her idea to call me. Her adult son had heard of me from someone else (I also get clients through word-of-mouth), and nagged her to call. So she shadowed me from the moment I got in the door, and not in a good way. Actually, it would be more accurate to say she took me on a tour of her house. She flitted from room to room and I had to follow, listening to her detailed descriptions of exactly what each pile was, and flatly refused to let me move most of it. I couldn’t scrub the entire bathroom floor, for instance, because there were boxes on it that absolutely could not be moved. She mumbled reasons why this moldy item and that empty container had to stay in the fridge, took ten minutes to move one shopping back six inches to one side in the dining room…You get the idea.
So after three days, during which I was not able to complete one task, her son stopped me on my way out and gave me my pay and a little extra for my trouble, and that was that. Sad, really. But that’s the only time a client was uncooperative.
I’ve got some gross stories, but I’ll get to them in another post.
And I never heard of Sunshine Cleaning. ::checks IMDB:: Huh. Well, if it’s voluntary cleaning of biohazards, it’s not my line!
ETA: freckafree: I advertise online. I also have business cards, and as I said, word gets around. I advertise squalor recovery as well as basic cleaning. No one’s ever mentioned Hoarders.
