I’m cleaning the ol’ 10x12 shithole today - I can’t believe some of the crap I not only own, but brought to college with me.
But the worst thing I’ve ever cleaned was a clubhouse on a farm in Missouri. This was a tiny little wooden shed that my cousins had used years ago as a place to hang out. There was rotted food all over the floor. This place hadn’t seen any humans in about five years. A bean bag chair had exploded in there, and there were bean pellets all over the floor. I spent the first two hours sweeping this out the front door.
What really made the job, though, was the wasps’ nests. There had to be at least 30 nests in this wooden toolshed. The walls were covered with them.
Keep in mind:
It’s Missouri.
It’s August.
I’m TWELVE.
And I’m not getting paid.
My apartment, last weekend. Ok, it shouldn’t have been that bad. It only took 8 hours, and that included crawling under the bed and getting all the books out from underneath. There were eight bags of trash that I had to take to the dumpster once I was done.
Ok, I’ve only lived in this apartment for two years. How did I accumulate all that crap (and not white elephant crap type either)?
Ah well, it’s clean now. I rearranged the furniture and I’m really really going to try to keep it this way.
My parents place after they went on vacation when i was 16
and didn’t come back for 3 weeks. Damn i made alot of mess
and managed to clean it up for their arrival home. Course
not as bad as scarestories i’ve heard about the nightmare job of peep show cleaners , not that I have been to those places or been a cleaner in one of those places either.
Some friends and I purchased a house which previously was a drug rehab owned by the scientologists.
The entire place was pretty gross, so we pulled most of it down. The worst room was the main floor toilet, which a had a deep pile of shit on the floor, in and on the toilet, and thrown and smeared on the walls and ceiling. Needless to say, we knocked that room down entirely right at the start.
So here I was, in the Army, where they like your boots to be shiny, and I just never got the hang of shining boots well. Someone introduces me to the concept of heating up the can of Kiwi before boot-shining. So I set the jumbo sized can of boot polish precariously on the lip of the electric kettle I have, which is itself sitting on a little wall, about four feet off the ground, which separates the toilet from the sink. I don’t remember how it happened, but after I forgot about the Kiwi long enough for the entire jumbo sized can to liquify, I managed to tip it over onto the toilet side of the partition. So I had molten boot black splashed all over the toilet and the floor and about three feet up the walls. Fortunately there was no carpeting involved. But it took me forever to clean that up. I never was able to get it out of the grout, which was a problem, what with room inspections and all.
I like to keep a clean and organized living space, which is impossible, of course. However, I keep it under control with frequent cleaning and throwing-away.
But, way back in the ooollllddd days I shared an apartment with my brother and we were both dead set against ever cleaning up after the other, which meant nothing ever got cleaned at all. We lived there for a year. I had moved us in while my brother was out of town, so he had the job of moving our furniture out. He brought over some friends while I was away, and moved the furniture. The furniture was gone, but the mess was still there! You could hardly tell the furniture was gone! You’d think he and his friends could have cleaned up some, but no.
I had to clean up a basement under a 200 year old building when the boiler exploded. What fun, mopping up muddy water full of mouse shit and god knows what else. It turned out there were tunnels down there that ran underneath all the buildings on the block, but were mostly closed off and disused for decades.
As I was cleaning, serendipitously, my mop accidentally poked backwards through a rotten board and exposed a niche in the wall. Stashed in the hole, I found a perfectly preserved Budweiser can (opened on the bottom even) and a Pabst bottle (opened and empty), they had dates on them from the year Prohibition ended (1930s? 1920s? I forget). I guess someone either stashed their empties, or left behind a little time capsule of the end of prohibition. I still have em.
It is either the mens restroom of the bar I used to work in or the farrowing house at a hog farm I worked at.
Actually I guess I’would rather clean up after Dumb animals not just disgusting ones.
Two disgusting cleaning jobs in the same small bedroom after two equally disgusting room mates at separate times.
The first, after I threw his lazy ass out, was a slob. You could barely find the carpet in there for all of the junk on the floor, including dishes and pots of ancient, moldy food, along with 8 liter bottles filled with piss!! (I guess he hated going out to use the bathroom.) The bed was in a corner and where he used to sit up against the wall to watch his TV, the wall was black and grungy. I had to wash it! I took 4 garbage bags of junk out of that 12X12 room! I found a whole lot of my missing dishes in there.
Same room, second room mate.
This guy was a drunk big time. After I canned him I got to go in and shovel out the room. I gave him a fold out small couch to sleep on in there because he had nothing. Turns out he would get drunk for days, pass out and piss all over himself and everything in there. The carpet was soaked with urine and booze. The couch bedding soaked with booze and urine. I hauled out the couch, which weighed a ton, and threw it away, then had to slosh my way in there and steam clean the rug to get as much of the urine out as I could. I just poured buckets of hot, soapy water on it and sucked the sludge up with the steam cleaner. I hauled out lots of empty booze bottles, and had to air out the room for a week. Then, after the carpet had dried, I had to buy a couple of bottles of that liquid potpourri, put it in sprayers and spray the carpet down with the stuff, turn on the A/C and close up the room for several days.
::My kitchen. I hadn’t done the dishes from breakfast and they were still in the sink that night. UGH! I have this pet peeve…I can NOT stand dirty dishes in a sink. Drives me CRAZY!!! My Tommy figured that out, so when I get to his house, he always has a coffee mug in the sink, just to see how long it’ll take for me to break down and wash it. The record…10 seconds. I walked in, blew past him and washed it. THEN, I turned around, said hello and kissed him.
Ok, that and dirty laundry. I hate seeing piles of clothes…especially dirty stinky clothes (Tommy plays baseball, so his uniform is usually in the wash)
My grandfather owned rental property. After one especially problematic bunch of tenants had been set out on the curb by the Sherrif’s office, my grandmother, mother, and myself went in to clean up the debris. When we opened the front door and flipped the light switch, the floors, walls, and ceiling were crawling ALIVE with cockroaches! :eek: Several bug-bombs later, we entered the place, and discovered not only had they not paid the rent, they hadn’t paid any utilities for some time either. The refrigerator was full of science experiments and rotting meat, and because the water was off, they’d filled the toilet up, then started using the closets instead. Their kids had drawn and smeared unknown substances all over the walls, there were containers of moldy takeout everywhere, and oh yeah, they kept un-housebroken dogs inside too, but with the rest of the stench, you hardly noticed.
We had to replace some of the drywall where the urine and other fluids had eaten into it, and sand down and paint the hardwood floors. The plumbing in the bathroom had to be taken apart, and the refigerator was a total loss. No amount of bleach or baking soda could get the smell out.
It was a house some friends of mine had just bought from his aunt. She was basically a slum lord, and the house had gotten so bad she had to kick out the tenants before the law got on her about it. They had been using it as a crack house, including the manufacture of crack. There was a huge hole cut out of the roof where they would cook the rocks in the attic.
The main rooms weren’t too bad. Just a lot of stuff the people had left behind. The stench however, was overwelming. We had to wear masks most of the time. The bedrooms were filled with old clothes and bare matresses on the floor where people had crashed. The carpets were so filthy they had to be all pulled out.
The basement floor was filled about two feet high with empty liquor bottles, dirty clothes and (i kid you not) furniture stuffing. No furniture, just the stuffing.
The worst was the bathroom. The toilet had become plugged so they had used the bathtub. They would go and then cover it up with a piece of clothing. The tub was full of crap and old dirty clothes. We even found a pile of waste on the ground outside the window that was just outside the bathroom where people had gone out the window into the yard.
It took us over a month to get the house cleaned and fixed up enough so that my friends could move in.
On the day I moved into my first house, I spent 12 hours making it vaguely habitable. The guy who moved out kept his two dogs in the understairs cupboard (despite having an interesting ornament in the front window, comprising a robot, a Barbie doll and a stuffed bear, rotating on a turntable, each carrying a banner stating “Battery Farming is cruel”) and the aroma of “eau-de-chien” hung around for some time.
It took me a further week to remove his 20 watt lighting system from the downstairs rooms. This comprised a series of lights hung from wires nailed to the walls. The reason for this lighting was that “if God had wanted us to have bright light, he wouldn’t have created night”.
The final insult came two weeks later, whilst doing my washing, when I noticed that the back yard was awash with bog roll. He’d blocked the drains, apparently by using newspaper in an attempt to economise.
Well, for a very brief period I worked as a housekeeper at a motel and during that time I cleaned up some huge messes.
It wasn’t the messes that upset me as much as what they were comprised of.
Dozens of beer and liquor bottles, chips ground into the carpet, ketchup on the walls-mere annoyances. Candles, condoms, lube and an overlooked sex toy or two–well it’s to be expected.
But, when you find 10 empty jars of honey, a dozen dog biscuits, assorted feathers, and a pair of handcuffs all together, something just ain’t right.
Came back home one evening to find that a blocked pipe somewhere* was causing the contents of every other toilet in my apartment block (20 units or so?) to come out of my toilet every time someone flushed. It had been going on for hours: my bathroom was full of solids, while liquids had spread over half of my floor area. Every time I sluiced stuff away, it would come welling up again. A nightmare.
I cat-sat for a grad school classmate one weekend. Oh my lord. I thought I was messy. She was filthy. I didn’t clean it up a lot, but I did tackle one table and wiped off a few things that hadn’t seen a sponge in 6 months. I felt sick that I’d eaten holiday cookies she’d handmade and given to me the year before. Yipes. I had no idea what kind of environment they’d come from.
Then, the woman who runs our local bird rescue has a house that’s quite a mess. In her defense, she keeps crazy hours (has to, she’s understaffed) and is taking care of her invalid and slightly senile father while running the rescue out of her basement. Every year she takes one vacation. It’s tradition for the volunteers to clean her house as a present. Wow, it was an effort.
Finally, two years ago my Junior League class took on a different sort of project. We loathed the image of pearls and heels and doing polite easy volunteer work. So we went for something heavy. A local drug rehab place had been closed several years ago. Since then, a bunch of kids had broken in and had destroyed the place for kicks. The owners were willing to lease it cheap to the local homeless shelter that works with families, but before it could be renovated someone had to get the destroyed stuff out of there. That’s what we did. There were torn-up sofas, tons of broken glass, ripped-up blinds, smashed drywall… I guess it wasn’t filthy, but we had to take dumpstersfull of destroyed innards out. It was so sad, too, because it was actually a really nice facility. Or it had been, before those little rat bastards had decided it would be fun to break stuff.
Ugh. I’ve had to help two friends move who were being evicted from their apartments–turns out that it was for “health code violations” in both cases. Damn, they weren’t kidding. They were both in the same summer, too.
I had thought the first one was pretty bad. My husband and I had called her a few nights beforehand and asked if she needed any help packing. “No, no, I’m working on it,” she said. “It should be all packed up by Saturday morning.” OK. So, we show up on Saturday morning, ready to flex our muscles on moving boxes and furniture from the apartment. We get up there to find her mother working on washing a HUGE stack of dishes. There were papers and trash covering the floor about six inches thick. There were bags and bags of newspapers and aluminum cans. There were even more dishes that hadn’t made it to the sink yet. Exactly one box was packed and sitting in the middle of all this. It would have been easier if we could have pitched all of the papers into the trash, but some of these papers were important–tax returns, pay stubs, student IDs, bills–you name it, it was there! She was saving up the aluminum cans and newspapers “to sell” (No, she’s not a crazy old lady–she’s in her 20’s, just like I am). I had taken a whole bunch of the bags to the recycling bin/dumpster area before she caught me and chewed me out for it! We cleared things out enough so that my husband could help move the large furniture to the truck, and then we left.
So, about a month later, another friend calls us and asks for help moving. She promises that everything will be packed, and that she just needs some help lifting “the heavy stuff”. She lived in a rooming house, so we were only moving stuff out of one room. Shouldn’t be too hard, we surmise. Ugh. We had no idea. This place was nearly knee-deep in papers and trash and other stuff. There were dishes gathering mold everywhere. There was also candle wax coating a large area for some reason. Once you got underneath the old papers/etc. layer, you came to the MOUSE SHIT layer! Ewwwwwww! (Fortunately, I did not come across any actual mice!) She was under a severe deadline, too, apparently, so we just packed it all up-- moldy dishes, mouse shit, and all, for her to sort out later. The worst part was that, when you could finally see the hardwood floor again, part of it had actually warped and buckled quite severely! She had had no idea that that had happened.
Damn, imagine what would have happened if their landlords hadn’t thrown them out! Would they have suffocated?
I’m pretty compulsive about keeping a clean house. I can’t abide clutter, dirty dishes in the sink, old newspapers, etc. The thought of leaving a dish, with food on it, in my bedroom is just totally foreign to me. You can imagine the fun I had in college when I lived in a fraternity house with 15 other guys, each of whom attempted to prove to everyone else that they could be the biggest pigs in the world.
We had a beach party in our house one spring. We even bought bags of sand and spread them out on tarps on the floor. A few wading pools, some fake palm trees, the whole nine yards. You can imagine the mess after about 300 people had spilled beer, thrown cigarettes, puked, had sex, generally debauched themselves. Who cleaned it up? Me. And that was a pretty tame party for us. Oh, the things I’ve seen. I shudder to recall it. I think I’ll go wash my hands.