My mom’s former boss bought an acerage at a hugely reduced rate because the former owners had kept BIG GAME in their basement - yes, that’s correct - Lions, and Tigers and Bears - OH MY!
Trust me - if you thought the litter box from a cat was stinky, you can’t even imagine what drywall, permiated with lion and tiger pee smells like.
I’m pretty sure she made up the discount by having to have everything down there hauled out and disinfected and replaced.
Ew.
My roommates and I deliberately trashed our apartment, once…
…and clicking will tell you the whole sordid story…
Reading everyone’s responses reminded me of another frightening house of an elementary school friend. This family of ten lived on a very large property that had once been a chicken farm, so there were lots of outbuildings and leftover equipment, which they never cleaned up (and, as people with a lot of property in semi-rural areas tend to do, they had their own private junk and garbage piles going.) Additionally, the father was into buying old, beat-up hearses that he would park in the field in front of the house .
The original house was not much more than a shack to begin with and as children were born dad would add on to the house in a weekend-warrior manner: a few 2 x 4s and plywood sheets.
This was bad enough, but the clincher came when half of the house burned down. The family bought a bunch of used (and I mean very, very used) campers, pulled the campers up flush to the charred holes of the shack and – voila – each of the kids had their own “bedroom.” It was kinda cool when I was a kid (especially as my friend’s camper had a little sink and potty) but in retrospect it is rather disturbing. Now I wonder why they didn’t just clean out the old chicken-housing buildings (which were solid brick with windows and electricity) and live there.
I had some good friends in high school. Good people, some of the most loving parents I’ve ever met, incredibly intelligent. Messiest house I have ever seen in my life–not filthy, really, because it wasn’t dirt so much as junk.
The kitchen surfaces were piled three or four feet high with…stuff. Not rotted food, but just…stuff. I had to change my baby’s diaper, and had to lay him on my lap to do it, beause there was literally nowhere in the house to put him.
There was a path about 18 inches wide through the living room, from one chair to another.
They were all clean, good folk. Just a little odd, and not worried about things like cleaning house.
My dad once bought a house from a woman who was a packrat–she had stuff (papers, grocery bags, junk) piled so high that we couldn’t open the doors to some of the rooms and had to climb in the windows to clean it out.
The third messiest house I’ve ever been in was my own. After my New Start in Life, though, it’s better. Now I’m not even close to the top of the list! (What a great feeling!)
I was once part of the cleaning crew of a house owned by a woman who had become old and senile and died. The last years of her life she had been “looked after” by a “boyfriend” half her age. Who I never met. Actually, I’m sort of shakey on a lot of details.
Anyhow, the boyfriend had, at one point, locked her three rather large dogs in a front room because he, I suppose, couldn’t deal with the anymore. He did continue to feed them, but never let them out. For anything.
Those dogs had been there a long time.
Dog food and water when in… nothing ever came out. Of the room, that is - things do come out of dogs, of course.
A loooooooong time.
We started with shovels.
Yes, the floor had to be replaced. After it was uncovered.
I actually kind of think it would be cool to have some kind of super-industrial spacesuit-like cleaning apparatus, where you’d have a fresh air rebreather and every square inch of you would be protected, and you’d be hosed off before you took your outfit off, so you’d be perfectly clean, smelling nice clean air, while attacking huge piles of anything with total gusto. It would be very satisfying, in a way.
I don’t have any stories that even come close to all of this, fortunately. Although reading these always make me feel MUCH better about my own apartment. 
I’ve been in a couple of those houses with the things stacked up with paths cleared for walking through. It’s hard to imagine unless you’ve seen it. There HAS to be something pathological about this behavior.
I once visited a house so filthy, with weeks’ worth of trash on every surface. There was a toddlers potty in the bathroom, and it was full to the brim with jelled urine. The urine had sat there for so long it jelled! I will never forget that.
You bet. I imagine it all comes down to “me against the world,” a lot of the time. Almost inevitably it is a sign of deep denial, of someone who has problems with some aspect of real life.
If you hoard objects, you may be saving them from an uncaring world that will throw them out or waste them, or alternatively, protecting yourself from the dangers outside (poverty/starvation/strangers). If you hoard trash, you may be anal or just paranoid (ie: people will go through your trash to find out all about you).
If you and/or your surroundings are compulsively dirty, you may just be OC about other matters (a surprising number of artists/musicians/rare book collectors are this way). Or you may just be rebelling against having cleanliness literally beaten into you as a child by misguided parents.
If you hoard pets, you believe YOU are the only person anywhere who cares about them. You continue to believe this even when they are filthy and starving…because it’s OK as long as it’s YOU. Perhaps the saddest case, because of the suffering it brings, and the callousness to that suffering – all ironically in the name of caring.
IRRC, people who clean up after murders and suicides actually have those suits.
The grimiest house I’ve ever been in was one of my friends’ in high school. Her mom was mentally ill and they had a handful of pets.
For a combination of clutter and grime, probably a distant family members’ where I spent Christmas one year. I lost my appetite just looking around me.
I’m not the best housekeeper in the world, though. I regularly scrub my bathroom, but I’m one of those people who does dishes twice a week, leaves their clothes in the laundry hamper, and never dusts.
For sheer grossness, it’s hard to beat a cat collector. Two of our kitties came to us as fosters from a house that had contained over 100 cats. Every surface was covered with offal, with the highlight being the actual “litter boxes”, so long neglected that they had become moldy.
Also, the people that the health department/humane societies send in to collectors houses often do wear haz-mat suits. It’s dangerous to breath that much mold & bacteria.
You left out people like me - just plain lazy, with a bunch of kids
My own house is the worst I’ve ever been in. Laundry & toys & yesterdays mail - oh my. (It’s sparkling clean & clutter-free compared to these stories, though!)
Last night’s CSI rerun had a guy with exactly that job. And one of those suits.
Additionally, the classic Mythbusters episode where they put two (dead) pigs in a corvette and lock it in a storage container for a month has footage of using environmental suits to cleanup a mess. IIRC, even with the full-face industrial respirators (filtered, no air tank) they were wearing they still gagged. A lot.
I have another one to add. It’s not as bad as some of these, but what really gets me is how clueless this woman is when it comes to cleanliness.
I have a neighbor who has two 15 month old sons. They are eating adult food now, but still haven’t really figured out utensils. At mealtime she sits them in their highchairs and gives them the sauciest food possible it seems. These kids live off of things like hamburger helper. Being that they’re only 15 months old, they think it’s fun to squish their food in their hands and throw things all over the place. Food gets all over the kitchen floor, in their hair, all over the highchairs. After they’re done she just kinda wipes their hands a little and lets them roam free. Oh, forgot to mention that they don’t wear bibs, so the food is all over their clothes too.
The boys then run all over the living room getting this food all over the cloth furniture. They’re still on bottles and have figured out how to play with them to get the juice or milk all over the place. The couch smells like rotting milk. There’re juice stains all over the place.
The dishes are never done. The sink always seems to be piled high and overflowing. The bottles are just thrown into the pile when she thinks they’re dirty (often after a day or two’s worth of use). She doesn’t bother rinsing them out so the little bit of liquid left tends to ferment. The milk becomes solid chunks. The bibs that she once used for them sit at the bottom of her kitchen sink. They’re the vinyl kind that you just wipe off. The have turned from green to brown and have a gooey film growing on them. She had fruit flies coming out of her sink and couldn’t figure out the cause.
The trash doesn’t get taken out nearly as often as it should. There’s often garbage sticking out of the top and piled over the lid. It also contains diapers. Now, I know toddler diapers don’t smell that great in the first place, but her children’s somehow smell ten times worse. Her entire apartment reeks of trash.
The boys’ room has more dirty diapers stacked on top of the diaper genie. The pad on the changing table is streaked with feces. Often times you can find old bottles in their cribs with remnants of juice or milk.
On several occasions I’ve helped the babysitter bathe them. The tub has chunks of things all along the bottom of it. It needs to be scrubbed. Both the babysitter and I have caught them eating three day old food off of the kitchen floor. Their babysitter refuses to even put them in their highchairs because of the crusted on food.
That’s just the filth. There’s clutter and mess on top of all that. I don’t know how anyone can stand it.
Years ago I was hangin’ out with a gal and she told me about her disgusting neighbors. She was prone to exagerate and I found it hard to believe all the nasty stuff she told me about these folks. The folks seemed pretty normal, the guy had a “good” job, the wife was a nurse (!) and the three little girls were “normal”.
They went on vacation and my friend had to feed thier dogs. She took me over to the house. I still find it hard to deal with what I saw.
Not a single horizontal surface without trash, dirty and clean laundry, dog crap and general disarray spread over it. The kitchen had crusty dishes piled in the sink and overflowing. Filth everywhere. Open jars of mustard, mayo, peanut-butter and everything else you can imagine just sitting on the counter, all with at least 2 or 3 forks, knives or spoons sticking out of them. Dogs roaming free to graze and crap as they saw fit. Discarded food everywhere.
The toilet was broken. That didn’t stop them from crapping in it. It just piled up to the rim, then they started to crap and piss in the bathtub!
Then they just went on vacation. Leaving the place like that. Food out, crap piled high in the toilet and tub, dogs roaming free. Oh, the humanity!
I heard a short time later that the county threatened to remove the children if they didn’t clean the place up.
This post can’t even begin to discribe how nasty the place really was.
I’m not one to scream for people to be reported to child protective services at the drop of a hat, but those children are in danger.
My across the road and down aways neighbor is a piece of work. he occasionally does construction work. The rest of the time he sits home drinking and playing video games. The wife works a lot of doubles at a resturant to just barely pay the bills.
A four car garage with an added on lean-to is packed solid with odds and ends of construction debris that he just might need a piece of someday. There are three non running vehicles in the driveway and yard. Semi rural area, so not all that weird yet.
I’m great friends with my next door neighbors. Their kids are the same age as the scummy neighbors. Pre-and early teens. The kids will play together but only outside. Neighbor kids refuse to go into scummo’s house because of the smell. The cars are the same way. You know it’s bad when the 15 year old neighbor kid will wait for a 30 minute school bus ride in 0° weather rather than ride in scummo’s car because of the smell. Bathing is optional and so is school attendance. Laundry and dishes are done out of absolute necissity. When there is nothing left to use/wear.
The last straw is when I found out the septic system broke down. Mr. scummo takes the 5 gallon pails that catch the drips and overflow in the basement to the back of the property every few days a dumps them out.
It’s a moral dilemma of mine to not blow them in for that. The kids are really good in spite of all this, and I don’t know how things would shake out for them.
The house I’m in now. My brother and my father have been living here since my mother died in 2001 and it is not good. Reading the posts is making me feel slightly better, but not much, 'cause I’m still stuck here until Sunday. That’s an awful thing to say, but I can’t wait to get out of this house and this town.
It’s dirty and it’s smelly and it’s stuffed with junk. Unfortunately, there’s ‘good’ stuff amid the junk, things of my mother’s that I want, so I’m going to pack up what I want and take it with us. But folks, it smells. And the longer I’m here, the more depressed and apathetic I feel. I wanted to throw out things right away, but my brother won’t let me. I keep opening windows, but my brother closes them. The walls are yellow/brown with old smoke. They’ve had a housecleaner come in weekly for the upstairs (the downstairs is your basic filthy nightmare with years of grime. clutter and garbage). But it’s gross. Every breath I take in here makes me feel ill, and it’s hard to stop breathing.
I went into the furnace room to sort through my teenaged possessions that I’d left here, and went through stuff that hadn’t been unpacked by my mum when they moved here, and this is no joke: I found fruitcake from the 1980s.
Fruitcake does eventually go bad.
I went through the house and took pictures with my digital camera because I never, EVER want to let myself get like this. I’m a bit slobby, too, so it’s not a long way to slide. (I love a nice clean house, but there’s more fun things to do than clean–like read the Straight Dope Message Boards!)
Heavy indoor smoking and bachelor living do not cleanliness make.
Also, before my mum got sick, I think she was depressed, too. Her room (my parents were living kind of one up / one down separate lives) had to be cleaned out by me while she was in the hospital, and it was beyond belief. THere were no surfaces available, no floor to be seen, and she was hoarding newspapers and stuff because was ‘going to read them’. Same with videotapes–she was a news junkie, and as much as she watched TV, if you’re taping two shows while watching a third, you’re never, ever going to get caught up. Then there was the shopping thing… I found 24 boxes of bread machine bread mix in her bedroom. Unbelievable.
I just need to stop this before it sets in in myself. Luckily, I don’t think my husband would stand for it.
I wish I could set this house on fire, but I can’t. I keep telling myself it’s not my problem and it’s not my house–but it is. I’ve inherited half.
The squalor is making me immobile and apathetic, but it’s also distracting me from the grief over my father.
I just don’t know how it will ever be cleaned up enough to sell. I’m hoping my brother will buy out my half and then it will be his problem.
I realize that it needs to be done. The babysitter and I are trying to find polite and subtle ways to show her how to do it. I really don’t think she knows better. Lately we’ve resorted to outright telling her what needs to be done and how to do it. She’s still not bright enough to figure it out.
We’re trying to figure out how CPS can get involved without her children being taken away and without her realizing who called. In the meantime the babysitter and I try our best to make the living environment for the boys better.
Did I mention my brother’s 106-pound Rottweiler who’s in the house? (No dog pee or poop yet, though he barfed on the steps.) And the chain-smoking? Dog and Marlboros. The funk, the funk, the funk. And the fact that when my brother makes something to eat, he just throws bits of food on the floor for the dog?
The upstairs bathroom is sort of okay–there is that lovely stale-pee smell, though, and there is no exhaust fan. He’s been smoking in there, so the walls and ceiling have brown drip marks and spots all over from shower condensation meeting dust, grime and smoke.
When I get home, to my own house, there will be some serious housecleaning going on.