Do you have a job where you go into other people's houses?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. My sister a while back told me about her exterminator recounting his stories of some of the people he had worked for. He would explain that he would have people that wouldn’t call him until they were literally sleeping in the same bed with rats and things like that and that these kinds of situations happened more than we non-exterminators would guess. Then, talking to another friend who’s a paramedic, he said it has completely changed the way that he views people’s houses completely different as a result of his job. He says that on a regular basis they go into houses that are infested–walls black with cockroaches–or just plain filthy.

(Granted, this is in South Carolina, but it’s Charleston, not boonies. )

Now with shows about hoarding and stuff. I’m wondering about the way people live, and I’m curious to hear from other people who have jobs that require you to go into other people’s houses. Especially on very short notice, like a paramedic, where people don’t have time really to prepare for your arrival (granted I know the conditions immediately proceeding your arrival might mean that the house is in more dissaray than it normally would be). Are you surprised at the regularity at which you see certain things or experience certain conditions in other people’s houses? If you’ve been doing what you do for a long time, have you seen certain changes over time?

I think there’s a lot of knowledge to be tapped here.

2

I’m a general handyman, so almost all of my work takes place in other peoples houses. It’s definitely changed the way I view others homes, in that what I considered filthy in high school, and what I find filthy now are two totally different things. Let me tell you about the house I was called to that changed my definition.

A couple and their 3 kids had been living in a 3 bedroom two bath house. Despite the guy making a very good living, they were evicted for not paying rent. When I got there to replace a toilet and kitchen faucet, the owner had just begun cleaning up.

The tub in the bathroom was a brownish black color. I made the remark that it was the ugliest tub I had ever seen. The owner informed me that when the evicted occupants moved in, it had been white. The toilet was in a similar state. Instead of trying to clean them, the owner was replacing them outright. He left me to removing the old toilet, and installing the new one. When I got through, I headed to the living room. He had (literally!) shoveled dirty clothes off the couch and flipped it. Underneath was a horrid collection of coke cans, dirty diapers containing waste of both kinds, moldy dishes, insects, dead rats, and snakes. The smell was indescribable. I’ve been in septic tanks that smelled better.

After shoveling dirty clothes off the rest of the furniture and flipping it, we found the same thing. Apparently these people had never heard of a trash can, or so I thought until I went into the kitchen. There I found 3 large trash cans overflowing with rotting food, maggots, and trash. The counters, table, and sink were buried under moldy food and dishes. Against my better judgment, I opened the fridge. I slammed it shut when something ran out and over my feet. It might have been a large rat. I’m not sure. I do know it had a bone in it’s mouth.

While I was cleaning out the sink and replacing the faucet, the landlord came in and opened the doors to the laundry room alcove, and was promptly buried under filthy, stained, mildewed clothes. From the looks of this alcove and the living room, the people hadn’t believed in washing clothes. To have that many dirty clothes, they had to have been wearing clothes once, then tossing them somewhere and buying new.

After finishing the sink, I could’ve left, with three times what I had quoted him for my work. Instead I opted to stick around, see what else they had done to the place, and if I’d get any more work out of the house. Our next stop was to what should have been a child’s bedroom. Instead, it was a room of animals. In cages that hadn’t been cleaned, ever, were ferrets, rabbits, and a chinchilla. The carpet looked like the animals had been allowed to run free in the room, using it as a litter box. The landlord closed the door and called animal control.

The next room was where the children slept. Two boys and a girl shared this room. The baby boy slept in a baby bed with a soiled mattress. Sitting at the end on the floor was a trashcan overflowing with soiled diapers. The other two kids, a boy and a girl, slept on a soiled mattress on the floor. Dirty clothes, dishes, and broken toys littered the floor, while the closet looked like it had been used as a toilet a time or two.

Next stop was the master bedroom. Porn everywhere. Movies, magazines, and home made pictures. Used condoms and sex toys. More dirty dishes and clothes. Half empty bottles of wine and liquor. The usual collection of dirty dishes and clothes that could be found throughout the house. In here we also found a cat, and a litter box that looked like it hadn’t been scooped in weeks, if ever.

From there we went to the master bath. It was like someone took the master bedroom, and the small bathroom, and smashed them together, with the addition of used tampons littering the floor and stuffed inside the drawers and cabinets.

The owner ended up hiring a cleaning agency to clean the house at 2.5 times their usual rates, and it took 3 people 65 hours to get it done.

Child services were called on the parents, but I don’t know how that turned out.

3

Good god, Mr. Accident. I wonder how that even happens. If the guy was making a good living…how does a family end up in such squalor? I guess mental illness can play a role, but you said it was two parents? You’d think one of them would be able to do…something. I don’t know.

Man, and I sometimes feel guilty for not putting away my clean clothes right away.

4

Jeez! That is disgusting!

Just to be clear though, this is the exception, or do you have similar experiences on a regular basis?

5

No good stories but my wife worked for Orkin for awhile, she agrees with the OP, a LOT of houses she went to were too dirty to live in.

6

IME, more common than extreme filth is pack-rat clutter, where rooms are simply filled with so much stuff that it’s difficult to move around or do anything.

7

I get embarrassed whenever I call a contractor and I have a sink full of dirty dishes and I haven’t dusted in a couple of weeks.

Then I read a post like Mr. Accident’s and I start to feel like a neat freak. Seriously, I’m not the greatest housekeeper in the world, but I do my laundry and dishes on a regular basis and I scrub the bathrooms and clean the floors on a regular basis. Anyway, threads like this make me feel a lot better about my Holly Homemaker skillz.

And they also make me want to go clean out every junk drawer, crammed closet and storage space I have. (Same reason I watch Hoarders. Every episode inspires me to clean something.)

8

From what I was later able to gather, it was sheer, outright laziness on the parts of the parents. The dad figured since he was out working every day, he shouldn’t have to clean. The mom spent her days out shopping and ldriving around town. I wasn’t kidding when I said a very good living either. The guy made between $2 and $4k a week, depending on how many houses his framing crews did in a week. Instead of doing light house work and hiring a maid, they spent their money on food and needless luxuries.

I wouldn’t even blink an eye at clean dishes not being put away.

What surprises me, and I’m guilty of this myself, is how little people dust. A good 50% of the houses I go into don’t seem to receive regular dustings.

Yes, this is the exception. So far that’s the worst house I’ve been in. In an average month, I might see 1 house bad enough to make me call child services if there’s a child around. Mostly I see rack pat clutter, or houses where people didn’t straighten up from the night before. Nothing to write home about.

9

As I’ve metioned before, I tried door-to-door encylopedia sales for about a month. Don’t recall seeing anything out of the ordinary, though.

10

As a narcotics/violent crime/homicide investigator I’ve been a fair number of homes, (usually uninvited or, at least, unexpected). Granted, the places I’ve been in weren’t a fair cross section of society but at least 75% of suspect homes were filthy beyond belief. I don’t care how economically deprived you are. How hard is it to take out the trash? How can you walk by that paper plate with fuzz growing on it every day and not throw it out? Or the frying pan with grease in it that is older than half of the kids in the house? You have the money for 50 pairs of sneakers but not enough to hire an exterminator or buy a can of Raid? WTF is wrong with these people? I don’t see how being poor leads to being a slob but, in the vast majority of cases, it seems to. Every now and then I’d go into the home of some drug dealer in the projects and the place would be spotless. Predictably, he lived with his mother. And she had a job. BTW, filth has no racial preference, in my experience. Also, slightly off topic, you’d be amazed at the things you find when executing a search warrant for drugs.

11

Oh, do tell?

12

I do home health visits. I do have a few dirty homes I go to with bugs, waaaaay too many pets indoors or filthy bathrooms but even more numerous are pack rat clutterers. On the first visit to one home I collected an entire 30 gallon trash bag of empty medicine bottles! Newspapers and magazines and mail all stacked up together, medicine bottles parked wherever seemed handy, snacks stashed in odd corners: none of this bothers me anymore. However, when I asked one dear lady what the odd smell in her couch was and she said it was probably a dead rat, I didn’t sit on the couch anymore.

If a house is really filthy and the person can’t take care of it, I get them hooked up with some programs to provide a homemaker aide.

13

I suddenly feel much, much better about my housekeeping skills and a deep, intense desire to clean my bathroom.

14

When i was in college, i worked for a small catering company (run by just two guys) that specialized in serving lunches in corporate boardrooms during the week, and that often did jobs in private houses on the weekend. Of course, these houses were invariably neat when we arrived, not only because the person was about to hold a dinner party, but because, in most cases, the owner paid someone else to do the cleaning.

And, even among people i know, that’s a pretty decent predictor of how clean and tidy someone’s house is likely to be. The people who can afford to hire someone to do it almost always have cleaner houses, on average.

15

I used to be a telephone installer. I loved it; going into people’s houses was the best part.

Now at the time, I considered myself a slob, but not a filthy slob, in the sense that I would pick everything up off the floor, wash the floor, then throw everything back down on the floor and make the bed. Very little putting things away, but I did move them around so I could clean under them, so if anybody had put them away, the underlying object (bed, floor, desk) would be pretty clean. And of course I washed the clothes when they needed it.

When I started going into peoples’ homes on a regular basis, I realized that I was probably in the top half when it came to cleanliness, probably the top quarter. But I also realized I would never be in the top 10 percent.

Now, as an installer, obviously most of the homes I went into were places people were just moving into. But I also pulled phones out of places people were just moving out of, and you could really tell who had moved the furniture to clean and who had not.

But as a repairman, it was a whole different gig. There was the house where, when I took the phone off the wall–and I really didn’t want to touch the thing without gloves–but when I pulled it off the wall about two dozen cockroaches jumped out. I was embarrassed about screaming. I did suppress the urge to run out of the house.

And then there was the crawl space, under the house, that was actually cleaner than my house. Not a single instance of cobwebs, any kind of insect or animal, no dust on the pipes.

There were houses that could really surprise you–outside, dilapidated, in need of paint and a new roof. Inside, immaculate. And the reverse: Outside, looks like old money; inside, looks like crime scene!

My favorite experience involved a very large, very stately home, where in the garage, it looked like the occupants had gone into a sporting goods store and ordered one of everything. And then stopped at a tack shop and did the same. It would be hard to name a sporting item that was not represented.

(There was another large, stately home, where the housekeeper, an older woman, was down on her knees scrubbing the floor, and she chewed me out good for having such a hard job. She said something to me every time I walked through, with a ladder or whatever, that I would regret it, when I was her age, having done such hard physical labor. Frankly, between climbing up telephone poles and scrubbing floors, I will take the telephone poles.)

16

The filthy, unkempt places sound like those of meth-heads. I wonder if Mr. Accident noticed any signs of drug use at his “house”.

17

I’ve told squalor stories before, but in this case, I’d like to talk about the houses themselves. In particular, one that took my breath away, and one that sucked out my will to live.

I’ve come to find that most houses and apartments in L.A. are modular and simple. White walls. Laminate floors. Laminate cabinets. Maybe marble countertops. White tile. Recessed windows with no frames or anything. Venetian blinds. Nice, but not very special. Some people are better at decorating than others, but the houses are pretty much all the same. With some exceptions. Some houses are built to individual tastes. This can be good or bad.

The bad: A house in a fairly generic suburb. The client told me she’d been “modifying” it for the past ten years or so. I wondered what it had been like before, because what she’d modified it to was horrible. First of all, the flooring. Kitchen had scarred, tired ‘70s fake-tile, whatever that’s called. Then there’s laminate in the living room/dining area and down the hall. And a little bit into the master bedroom, where it gets abruptly cut off for the horribly chipped tile in the master bath, and the real wood floor in the bedroom. And the other two bedrooms had unmatched carpet. Oh, and the floor in the dining area sloped, which was a barrel of laughs when mopping. And the sink in the master bath was askew (husband was somewhat disabled and had to pull himself up on it). And the client was always complaining about how “messy” her 10 y/o son was, and I’m thinking, “You give him nothing to store his toys in, and only a milk crate for his books. Then you complain that he ‘throws his stuff all over.’ W/e.” And there was no color scheme anywhere, no theme or anything. Which is not bad in and of itself (and hardly unusual) except that she was constantly patting herself on the back because “I have really good taste!” As she shows me another tacky Christmas ornament from Big Bertha’s House O’ Glurge. When she cancelled me, citing financial difficulties, I went weak with relief. (I did get two other clients through her.)

The good: In the hills. Actually had more of a Northern California flair. And a definite Frank Lloyd Wright influence. Redwood. All hardwood floors. Multi-level. Loft had built-in bookshelves, for instance. Grand sala went on forever, with a fireplace, a nook with benches, pillars seemingly freestanding but probably holding up the ceiling, ending in a semi-octagonal window seat. Upstairs, the bedrooms had wide, glossy white sills and frames, and linen curtains, the kind with loops built in instead of rings attached. Fifties-style (I think) bathrooms: lots of chrome and mixed sizes of tile, mostly white but with the occasional colored tile dotted around. Downstairs, there was a breakfast room off the kitchen, with a chrome-and-formica table. And this could be seen from the foyer, through a leaded-glass floor-to-ceiling window. There was another such window just randomly dividing the sala, too. Honestly, I could see Madeleine L’Engle’s Austin family living in this house*.

I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff, but I was struck numb with awe, and I’m sure you get the idea. The job was a one-off, cleaning up after a large party, and only took about 2 1/2 hours**. So afterwards, I told the client, “I have to be honest, I’ve wanted to weep with envy ever since I walked in here. Did you build this house, or did you buy it like this?” She understood why I’d be interested, and spent the next half hour giving me a tour. They’d bought it already built, but had made a lot of changes themselves. For instance, she told me, every color of paint on the walls was a blend, not a standard color. And the shelves were their doing, built for paperbacks and only paperbacks. And so forth. I never heard from her again, but I was talking about that house for days.

*Sipping their cafe au lait and not understanding why not everyone in the world has their perfect integrity. Sanctimonious little snobs.

**I charge for four hours, even if the job doesn’t take that long.

18

Ritalin, liquor, wine, and tylonal were the only drugs in the house, legal or otherwise. If there was anything else, they took it with them.

I have been in a couple of meth head houses, a meth lab, and a house where they wanted me to install a watering system for their pot plants. All 4 of those were cleaner than the one I listed above.

19

Why doesn’t everyone in the SC boonies just shoot themselves? It’s not like they’re worth a shit to anyone.

20

You’d love my sister’s house in Texas. Her husband’s a hobbyist woodworker who also does stained glass and he’s serious about his hobbies. This is a guy who’d watch “This Old House” to laugh at Bob Vila.