This article on cat-collectors sheds some light on the phenomenon of people like in this story:
When I started dating my now-Hubby as a teenager, I suspected that all was not right at home because he didn’t invite me in. Clearly he was ashamed of something. Eventually I was invited in, and in my mad infatuation I continued to spend time there in order to see him. His Mom’s house was along the lines of tremorviolet’s link (although she did have a broken couch that we could sit on). I’ll skip the fine details and just give the highlights.
-
There was the bathroom where huge chunks of wall were missing and rotted, and a piece of garden hose had been installed for use as a shower. There was also some kind of problem with the toilet such that it was perched over the open sewer hole.
-
Her kitchen was piled to the ceiling with dusty pots and pans, some with food still in them.
-
Her two cats were crusty. I’m not kidding. I love cats, but I never petted hers because they were so pathetic. They were balding and their skin was crusty with scabs. I think it was mostly a flea problem, not a disease.
-
There were the crickets and small critters that had achieved access to the crawl space. Hubby told me later that laying in his bunk bed, he often heard them skittering about above his head at night.
-
There was the Thanksgiving meal we ate in her dining room wherein the smell of catshit overpowered the turkey. My brother-in-law’s way of dealing with the litter box? Just open the back door & toss!
-
There was the time I tried to vacuum just the living room in preparation for my parent’s only visit. First I had to find the vacuum cleaner and dust it off. Then I started trying to sweep (having cleared the magazine/old food/clothes debris). The clouds of dust I kicked up were so thick I couldn’t breathe.
-
And, there were parts of the house that I never did see - they were too gross to be used at all! One room had rats.
Hubby left home right after high school & never lived there again; he’d given up trying to fight the mess and couldn’t wait to get out.
I grew up in a dirty house. We’d clean once a year when the apartment inspectors came around. I never got to invite my friends over.
It happens with just one act. Maybe you cook dinner and don’t want to do the dishes right away. Maybe you start an art project and don’t finish it. So then you live around the mess for a while, figuring you will clean it up soon. You cook a few more meals, and the dishes start piling up. The trash starts overflowing and it will be hard to take it out. The mess just keeps getting bigger. Pretty soon you have something that you just don’t want to deal with at all, and you stop going in the kitchen/bathroom/living room at all. Then it becomes a big dumping ground for the mess that has now invaded the rest of the house. Finally the whole house just falls to squalor.
For my mom, it started with laundry. Laundrymats are expensive, and coming up with the five dollars or so it takes to do a weeks’ laundry isn’t always possible. So it piles up. And then you’ve got a $40.00 mess that will take all day to do. Practically impossible. And if your bedroom is so full of dirty laundry that you can’t walk, why really bother with the rest of the house? A dirty house is depressing, and probably a sign of depression. All the cards are against you up and cleaning it at that point.
We got richer and moved to a bigger house. In this house “a place for every thing” was actually possible, and we had more free time (weekends wern’t spent taking long bus rides to the discount food outlets and wasting away at laundymats) and money to keep things in good shape. My mom’s house hasn’t been more than marginally dirty for five years. On my own I’ve kept a sparkling clean house, but it is hard sometimes.
My boyfriends’ house should have probably been condemned when I moved in. Every dish was dirty- you cleaned dishes before meals and left them dirty at the end. There were stacks of books and garbage and stuff everywhere. The bathroom looked like a horror movie. There was mold everywhere.
Part of it is that he just never learned how to clean. Nobody ever told him how to mop so that your not just swishing the dirt around, or how to clean so that the mold just doesn’t grow right back. Part of it was that he didn’t have appropriate storage for his stuff so it’d just end up on the floor. Part of it was that it was just too big a project and it was so much easier for him to just live in the filth than confront it.
Part of it is that this house is just damn hard to clean. I’ve cleaned it since, but it still gets bad despite weekly attention. Mold grows on the floorboards and window ledges and no amount of bleach can kill it for good. The toilet doesn’t drain right (and the landlord doesn’t fix things) so it gets a mildewy film. The shower isn’t installed right and water splashes on the walls and floor giving the nasty mold a new foothold. The kitchen isn’t seperated from the other rooms so steam condensation makes nice damp mold environments everywhere. Poor ventilation, oldeness, mold problems, lack of storage, poor maintance, cheap materials and unfortunate layouts make some houses naturally dirty.
Oh, yeah, there’s a big difference between basic everyday clutter that everyone has and absolute squalor like mold and filth and animal shit all over. I have two kids and a sloppy husband and keeping up with their clutter is a huge task. But we’re not living in filth. :eek:
I can spend the day cleaning and vaccuuming and putting away all the clutter, and the house looks pretty good, but once the kids are home for 10 minutes and they dump their school stuff all over and change their clothes and make snacks, we’re back to the mess again.
But there isn’t years of mold growing anywhere or ankle-deep cat-shit on the floors.
Maybe I will send some of these links to my mom–she is always saying things like, “This place is a pigsty!” but we aren’t even at level one squalor. You know, just give her some perspective.
Possibly because of reading this thread, I cleaned out one of the kitchen cabinets yesterday. I found cake mix from 1997. I ended up throwing away at least half of the stuff in there.
I take exception to the statement made about how single guys live.
I’ll admit my room is a little cluttered, in that I have accumulated so many books and stuff that the bookshelf I have not only has books stacked on top of books ad infiinitum 
but they are also in drawers and stacked on my desk/windowsill. But that’s probably the absolute worst. We have housekeepers come by every 2 weeks to tidy up the whole house, but the funny thing is I actually will usually pick up my room the day before, because I get kind of embarassed to think my room might be the messiest one of all. Lately I’ve been making a real positive effort at getting my room even cleaner still, by doing everything I can to maintain the serenity and cleanliness it has when the housekeepers get through vacuuming and dusting.
I can’t fathom not washing the sheets. I wash my clothes a lot- particularly work clothes. TMI, but I’m a sweaty guy. That means I get smelly really easy. However, that does not mean I want to sleep in my own funk at night. I wash my sheets every week or so. I try not to let dirty clothes accumulate in the hamper. I keep my bathroom clean even though the housekeepers also clean it. I shave and brush my teeth in the shower, something a lot of bachelor’s should consider since it results in MUCH LESS cleaning needed.
I know I am not a total slob because when I go to my friend’s apartment there is always a new unpleasant surprise waiting for me there. My friend lives with 2 single women, and ironically enough it is he that is the cleanest one among them. The 2 women often quarrel over who made what mess, until both of them get so pissed they each refuse to clean ANYTHING. They often will cook food and leave pots and pans containing leftovers sitting on the stove. Their refridgerator is full of rotting leftovers. Their bathroom has used, bloody tampons being devoured by ants :eek: laying behind the toilet and in the bathtub. All the drains frequently get clogged with the combined shed hair of all three of them.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
This thread makes me feel a lot better about MIL’s house, which is only stage 1!
My parents were just this side of, or just barely, stage 2. Except for the garage and basement, which were stage 3, but I think that’s the case with a lot of people. Point is, anything I know about cleaning, I learned either on my own or at work. Slight embarrassment when I met Mr. Rilch and he had to tell me how to use Top Job to clean a wall. I saw that the walls were dirty; honestly, I did! But I didn’t know it was possible to use anything other than Windex, which of course didn’t work.
One thing I wonder about. So many of these anecdotes mention “half-filled” plates of food. Now, I can understand the remnants of food, like grape stems or pizza crust; that would go along with all the other stuff that doesn’t get thrown away after it’s been used (up). But piling your plate with food and leaving half? Could it be that these people are more repulsed by their living conditions than they let on (or even fully realize), and can only manage to eat enough to take the edge off their appetite?
Actually, I wonder how many compulsive overeaters also live in squalor.
Do these people (who live in squalid conditions) lose their sense of smell? I cannoyt imagine to live in a house where rotting food is left on plates in the kitchen? Ugh! The minute I smell spoiled food, I throw it out, and claen the kitchen with bleach.
Even worse…dog and cat feces…how on earth could you stand it?
As I had posted earlier, it is amazing that this phenomenon occurs in rich neighborhoods. The thought of living in a filthy houise makes me ill.
I’m not sure why it’s so amazing that rich people are like this too - income and personal hygiene aren’t connected (and some people’s professional lives give absolutely zero reflection of their personal lives). As to the smell, I imagine that you get accustomed to it, just like any other smell. It builds up gradually, you get used to it gradually, and eventually, it’s horrendously overwhelming to anybody who visits, but you can’t smell a thing (although I do imagine that coming back into a house after being out for a day must make a person able to be at least dimly aware that there’s an unpleasant smell).
I’ve missed this thread for while, sorry.
Afitted kitchen is one with counters and cupboards fitted againest the walls. This one just had a kitchen table and a stove againest the wall and an old fashioned Victorian sick. God knows where they kept their kitchen stuff. I didn’t even see signs of a fridge or freezer!
:smack: Sink even. I previewed and everything
I grew up in a house that, while it wasn’t actively nasty, was filled with clutter and dust. My mom is disabled, which means she can’t clean as well as she’d like to. My father worked construction all day and when it came to cleanliness, he was an absolute bachelor at heart. I cleaned when the mood struck me, but it wasn’t all that often. There was too much stuff my mom had accumulated that I couldn’t toss out, and there wasn’t really any point of doing much more than vacuuming the rug once in a while.
My bedroom was a train wreck, mainly because my mom couldn’t get up the stairs to see how bad it was an yell at me. I’d do a total wipeout about twice a year and start fresh, and then start to build up layers of clothes tossed everywhere.
My cleaning aptitude corresponded with my mental mood to a T. I had apartments that were, again, completely trashed. Never with things like old food or cat poo, but just stuff strewn everywhere, especially clothes. (No car + no washing machine = laundry done on a very irregular basis). I was also clinically depressed at the time and often stayed out till all hours drinking, ignoring my financial responsibilities (and cleaning duties) because “it just seemed too much”.
When I’ve shared apartments with others, the worst it ever got to was a mild clutter. Since I’ve gotten married and purchased a house, every Sunday is cleaning day. We might let it go a bit during the week, but that place sparkles come Sunday. Its still not showroom perfect like some homes I’ve seen, but its clean, comfortable, and smells nice. (I also am much more responsible when it comes to finances as well.) Even on its worst days, my house is much cleaner than the one I grew up in.
Physical and mental disability can play a major part in how clean you keep your surroundings. Mentally speaking, I know that if I was to suddenly become single again, I’d fall right away into my messy, apathetic habits. Its almost like you get a perverse thrill from ignoring the mess around you. It also matches your mental mood - why clean when no one is coming over to see it? Since no one comes over, why not revel in my messiness? Won’t it be more depressing if I clean and there’s no one to see it?
Evidently, you guys don’t watch
“Growing up Gotti”
:eek: :eek: 