To want to know what they mean by "horribly messy"

[MrsPreston11]

Just had the plumber leave mine, I always offer workmen a cup of tea and while he was finishing it he thanked me a lot saying he didn't get offered a cup the job before, but he was sort of grateful as the house was so bad.

On another occasion someone who works for a letting agent said I wouldn't believe some of the things she sees (school mum who I'm not friends with but we were having sort of a group conversation waiting to be let in, so I couldn't pry)

Now my brain is going crazy wondering what these people see on a daily basis. I mean I've seen those shows abut hoarders etc, but assume that's very rare.

Any of you in these lines of work? I want to know what it is folks who get to go to lots of homes see!! (Pure perverse nosiness on my part)

Christ, I'm thinking about renting out a house I'm doing up (debating to do that or to sell it).

Terrifying to think that you could spend so much money making it nice and then just have the tenant from hell pay no rent and trash the place

When I was a youngster I used to live in squats. We were once poking about (what we thought was) an abandoned building, considering possibly breaking in but the door wouldn't give no matter how much pressure was placed on it. Turns out the entire interior was filled with domestic refuse - from between knee and chin height, in every single room.
I asked the neighbours and it turned out the guy that owned it had two houses: one for living in and one for putting his rubbish in. Apparently he would just drive up once a week and chuck black bin bags in through the windows. There were extensive rats nests in some of the rooms. The rats had just burrowed into the piles of crap!
Why he didn't just put the bins out for collection like a normal person is anyone's guess.

I grew up in a pretty grim house. Never dared have anyone round (I was bullied as it was). My parents' house stinks and there is never anywhere to sit down. Everything is piled up with stuff, the kitchen and bathrooms are filthy, the fridge is full of rotting food. Apparently I'm weird for having a problem with it. My mother goes absolutely balistic if anyone does any tidying. She clearly needs help but no-one is prepared to intervene. The GP has been to the house several times, but nothing. When my parents die, I'll just have to get a series of skips...

yourvagesty yes, it is a risk and it happened to me. Most people are of course normal human beings, and this tenant started off that way.

fortunately we had all the right insurances, but still had to spend two weeks sorting the filth and still lost money as no deposit covers what we had. And as I said, we were lucky as the place wasn't actually deliberately smashed up. All in all the brand new bathroom survived quite well.

we told people to wipe their feet when they left to avoid mucking up the street. Only half joking...

I'd not long met my partner and we were invited to a friend of a friends house for New Year's Eve. It was full of junk, even the sofa had stuff piled on it. There were three young children living therethe man got drunk, had an argument and disappeared not long before midnight so (seems trivial) but I didn't get a New Years kiss from dp, just a terrible evening

I lived above a family (nice Mum, Dad, two toddlers but everyone filthy, sorry but they were) and I went in their house one day when the Mum needed help with something.

I have never been so shocked in my life... filth everywhere, the smell nearly made me faint, I could see the bathroom and it was shit all up the walls, and what really got me was she liked pigeons, god knows how or why but she had loads inside the flat just flying around crapping everywhere, there wasnt anywhere that was not covered in bird poo, either dried up or fresh. There must've been about 10 pigeons just flying and dive bombing and crapping

They were eventually evicted an the LL pulled out everything and had a bonfire in the garden. I could smell it (not smoke smell but disgusting poo and filth smell) as I got off the bus about half a mile away

I have a very dear friend who lives in bad conditions. Her carpets are cream, heavily stained and filthy. The kitchen bin is rarely emptied and stinks the place out. The work surfaces are covered with dirty dishes and old, rotting food. Wherever you look there will be wine bottles, either empty or half full. Under sofas, behind curtains, mantelpiece, windowsills...There's one room that is inaccessible because of the sheer amount of stuff in there. I don't even know what it is! But it's piled from floor to ceiling in a totally random fashion. I thought that was all bad, but it got a lot worse when she got two kittens. The never-emptied litter trays were absolutely disgusting, they clearly used the whole house as their toilet because it STANK of cat urine. Absolutely everywhere. I have a very strong stomach but when I walked into her kitchen recently I nearly threw up, the smell was so bad. I had to put my head into the fridge to stop myself. She and her dd will eat food directly off the floor and then leave uneaten bits all over the place. It's just grim.

But it's not as bad as another friend's flat. He's 73 with mental health issues and he lives in indescribable mess. It's sheltered housing too so I have no idea why it's been left to get this bad. The minute you walk in, there's a sickly smell and it pervades the entire flat. The living room is crowded with stuff. Into every corner. There's a thick layer of dust over everything and cards that have been left up for ten years from his mother's funeral. He sleeps on the sofa which is filthy, stained, smelly and disgusting. There's a patch of grease where his head goes. The kitchen is truly unbelievable. It's piled all over with rotting food, bins and dirty dishes. I used to have a hot chocolate when I visited but I've stopped that now because I suddenly noticed that he wasn't washing the cup out between visits. Which were about twice a month. The bathroom was filthy and full of old shampoo bottles and his bedroom has an upended bed obscuring most of the room so you can't even open the door. The tiled floors are black with dirt which confused me because he said he mopped them every day. Then I saw the bucket of water he was using - it stank of sewage. He never, ever changed the water, just kept slapping on dirt over dirt.

I realise these are not on the same scale as some of the others, but they truly shocked me.

My mum is a council cleaner and some of the things she sees l. Walls caked with brown grease from chainsmokers, having to shovel poo out of overflowing toilets... and apparently for sorting that she doesn't deserve any more than minimum wage, but that's a whole other story...

I grew up in a messy house although not as bad as this. We were overcrowded with a mother who worked 40+ hours a week and came home to cook, clean and then work some more. Every surface was cleaned daily, the floor was washed as well but yhe overwhelming mess of five kids shoes, coats, bags, papers, toys and food in an enclosed space got too much. By the time she had picked everything up, done a wash and cleaned the surfaces iy was bed time and there was no time to do the bigger jobs. My brother wasn't dry at night until his teens leading to an unmistakable smell in the house. I remember every year or so Mum would redecorate and beg us to keep it cleaner this time, but as a large family we didn't see the mess and brushed it off. We were aware friends weren't visiting but in a way we didn't mind. I saw her crying at night a few times, but she would just get up the next day and work harder. Eventually we got tidier and moved out.

Dad was a sparky - pulled back a couch once and a load of used heroin needles fell out . Hundreds.
From my experience with student houses - washing up left for weeks, piled up bin bags and mouldy fridges. Vile.

When I was growing up one of my sister's friend's lived in a house where goats had free rein of the house and it smelled and looked like a farmyard inside and nobody ever cleaned anything. I met her again years later and was invited in for a cuppa at her house,it was immaculate and she said she cleaned obsessively which was a result of her childhood. She said her parents had replaced the goats with dogs and it was no better.

About 2 years ago I was walking past a house a few streets over from where I live, out came 2 British gas workers and I heard one of them declare "I think that's the most disgusting house I've ever worked in!!" I've always wondered just how bad it must be!!!

I work as a carer and some of the houses i had to go in are awful. Though i do care for the elderly and most can't get up to clean their home and don't have any support from family/friends. I would hate to live in those conditions and not be able to do anything about it

@needtogiveitablow Noooooooo!!! How the hell can anyone live like that.

I work for children's services for A large authority. We go out and do home visits. When we are discussing cases a question that often gets asked is ' would you have a cup of tea there?' More often than not the answer is 'no fucking way!!'
I've seen piles of dig shit in people kitchens, dirty underwear left on a hall floor and smells where I've had pretend I've left something in my car so I can get out and breath! It's disgusting seeing built up fat and grease in cookers and broken chairs piled up in the corner.
Sometimes I want to take all the kids hone with me than have them living in such chaotic conditions. ( except the ones that tell me to fuck off and then throw stones at my car!!)

My god this is horrible reading some of these. I know some of them can't really be helped eg disability/elderly etc but most can be avoided!!! I've always thought of myself as a really messy person (as does my mum who has a go at me every time she comes round for how I tidy my flat is) but I'm trying to keep on top of it all after a recent really good tidy up. I feel awful if my DS ever finds a bit of fluff on the carpet if I haven't hoovered for a few days a week 😳😳 really puts it in perspective doesn't it

My house belonged to an old lady who developed dementia and had to go into a home. I spent 3 solid days scrubbing the kitchen, everything was covered in a thick layer of yellow/brown grease.
The family had started to strip the house bare, the carpets were gone before we viewed. I dread to think what they looked like, including in the bathroom?! (a small remnant was left behind)

House so full of cats that engineers had to go home and shower and change as they smelt of cat piss.

used to be community healthcare professional...seen all of this. Interestingly anyone who answered the door apologising about the mess lived somewhere normal. The total grim ones just carried on as usual.

Google 'Daily mail dirty house' and it will bring up lots of articles with pictures of gross homes that children were living in etc

Our neighbours seem pretty normal on a superficial level but my god, their house. We could see from the state of the gardens (bin bags of rubbish left to rot - tons of it) and the view into their kitchen as you come down our garden path (piles of empty bean tins and other food packaging piled high on the windowsills) that they were not the most tidy people.

But one day when the dad asked me to come into their house to look at something... I can't even remember what it was. I was SO shocked. The piles of stuff everywhere. Literally piled high. One room with no furniture but just piles of children's plastic toys, large ones like cars and toy kitchens and stuff, all broken and piles together and unusable, pretty much up to the ceiling in places. You had to walk through this room to get to the kids' rooms, and I was worried it was going to fall down on us as we walked through.

The sitting room was just piled with stuff, like a hoarder's programme on TV. I can't even remember what the stuff actually was. Clothes I think, and newspapers, and cans of beer? There were sofas you couldn't sit on because they were covered in stuff. I think I was in shock tbh. I was shaking, literally shaking when I came out. I was so shocked they lived like that and so sad and worried for the kids. And gobsmacked they would casually bring me in to show me something and take me round the house without saying one single word about the state of it. As if that was completely normal.

I always worry about what people think of my house, as it’s a bit cluttered and not amazingly ‘tidy’, but it’s clean and evidently nothing like any of the previous posts.
We had a midwife visit once and offered her a cup of tea. She politely refused and said she never accepted drinks any more because she’d been to one house and drank a cup of tea only to be told the ds has peed in that cup earlier (but they’d run it under the tap, so it was fine). I’ve never quite forgotten that, poor woman!

Meh. My DH is a plumber and according to him half his colleagues are prancing bloody princesses who have the sort of stay at home wives who hyperventilate if a speck of dust settles in their house for longer than 30 seconds, disinfect their children twice a day and spills of bodily fluid from sick children with flame throwers and decontamination suits.

He hears from them about these appalling druggy dives you’d wipe your feet on the out, then he goes around there and they might not have sparklingly clean dishcloths and there’s a cat basket with some hair on it in the corner and the children’s homework is out on the carpet.

I know some people see some awful stuff but I take it with a huge pinch of salt as some people just have ridiculous standards.

I had a friend years ago who had a horrible house. She was lovely, did lots voluntary work. Had hobbies, kept bees so never seemed to have time for housework. Not as bad as some described here, no animal faeces and what have you but I always used to arrange for her to come to my house.
Her home was just hard to be in with young kids. There were piles of yellowing magazines, knitting wool etc. You would have to move it to sit on the sofa. The loo wasn’t covered in poo exactly but had that brown stain inside, the mugs had it too and there was a massive greasy tide mark round the bath. Oven and hob was greasy baked on dirt, kitchen floor sticky and dirty round the edges and the bins always rammed and stinky. She and her kids were a bit unkempt if you know what I mean, ratty hair and washed out jumpers, grey tshirts but they weren’t smelly kids. She just wasn’t bothered. She was a lovely and wise person but had this blindness about her home. They had a rodent problem once. She was really surprised. Nobody else was!
I am fairly messy myself but not unclean I hope.

I know some people see some awful stuff but I take it with a huge pinch of salt as some people just have ridiculous standards.

Mightymucks I read a book by a policeman specialising in child protection. He had been part of a squad working jointly with social services. Apparently there were some problems at the beginning because the cops would report these "terrible conditions" then the social workers would visit and say "er...no. My house looks worse than that"