Oh no @TweenWrangler , your post is taking me back to 2011, when we bought our first home.
The lady we bought from lived alone, with four black cats. On the day of completion, we were given the keys by the EA and arrived, with a car full of cleaning equipment (we knew from viewing there would be a lot of cleaning to do), to find her wafting around in what was a basically still full house! I am talking food still in the cupboards, beds made, washing up in the sink. She said we could come in. In the kitchen, she dropped and smashed a glass bottle of maple syrup and started pushing the resulting mess around with a dry mop. At that point, I said we would come back in a few hours.
She phoned my husband about 3 hours later to say she had accidentally flooded the utility room whilst trying to disconnect the washing machine. This had been a bone of contention, as she clearly did not want the bother of not taking it with her, so tried to sell it to us on the fixtures and fittings form, for about £350 (it honestly looked like she'd got it from a scrap yard already and was a make I'd never even heard of). We declined, meaning she would have to remove it herself or leave it there free of charge.
At this point, we phoned our Solicitor who advised us that getting them involved could end up costing quite a bit in fees. So in the end, my husband went round with the toolbox and helped her disconnect the machine. He also helped her dismantle two bed frames.
Funnier still, she had sedated all four cats for the journey to her new house, 3 were in their travel cages. But one had escaped and was obviously by now having the snooze of his life under a bush somewhere!
He eventually turned up the next day. We fed him but kept him shut in the utility room. We phoned her to say, the cat is back, please come and collect him. She did....three days later...which happened to be Christmas Eve!! So, we essentially adopted a semi-feral cat for three days. Daren't let him out into the rest of the house because we had cleaned by then and the cats clearly thought any carpet was there to be peed on 
not envy
I still can't quite believe we went out and bought a cat bed and food pouches/bowls for that CF of a woman!!!!
anyway, all that very long post was to say, it's hellish at the time,. but it's definitely something we laugh about now. And it opened our eyes to the levels of CF around the place!