which_chick (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
which_chick) wrote2026-01-22 09:03 am
which_chick) wrote2026-01-22 09:03 am
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Cleaning out a hoarder apartment...
I've been cleaning out a hoarder apartment. I have feelings about this.
The hoarder (we are not using names because ordinary citizens have some expectation of privacy, even in death) died in an efficiency (one large room with a kitchenette along one wall, separate bathroom) apartment where she'd lived for several years with her three dogs and cat.
By the time her son found her, she'd been dead a while, two of the dogs were dead, one dog was 'nearly dead' and they could not locate the cat. (It was a very full efficiency apartment and finding one somewhat hostile and reclusive, probably-dead-anyway cat in the... piles of things was a nontrivial matter that the son and constabulary understandably did not wish to undertake.)
Hoarder lived in a 22 unit apartment complex, with neighbors. And yet somehow nobody noticed she hadn't been "around" or thought to call in a wellness check on her. The son told me on the phone that the cops said she'd probably been dead "since Thanksgiving".
They found her last week -- I'm not clear on the date but I got a call from the son on Monday, January 12th -- probably over the weekend. During the "informing the landlord of the death of the hoarder tenant" call, the son emphasized to me that you could smell the apartment from outside the building as if this were some sort of red flag or trigger that should have alerted people to the corpse within in a more urgent and timely manner.
The problem is that the apartment had always reeked as you might reasonably expect a tiny efficiency inhabited by three dogs, a cat, and a less-than-tidy human with a "wee-wee pads" approach to dog toileting to reek. When the door to the unit was opened (she'd crack the door to hand me her portion of the rent, seeing inside was not really feasible), the odor of dog shit, cat piss, and cigarette smoke rolled forth like an almost-visible nauseating wave. What I'm saying here is that the scent of the apartment from outside the apartment was not markedly different after her death from what it was before her death.
At any rate, during that call, the son promised to use the three days off that he got for having a dead parent plus the MLK holiday weekend to clean out the apartment as much as he could, obviously not the furniture because he didn't have a truck, but, like, all the small stuff. And I agreed to allow him the time to do that. It is a small gift I give, letting people pretend that they're gonna do a thing that I know they are 100% not gonna do.
Like, if you've told me six times that there are dog feces on the floor of the apartment in a horrified tone of horror, I know you ain't be the one in there cleaning that shit (lol) up. You go make your adorable little promises and shit, but I know you ain't gonna go in that shithole and fix what your momma did. So on Monday the 19th, I checked in with him to see how he'd made out on the cleaning out the apartment.
Didn't happen. He couldn't bring himself... dog feces... she trashed the place, it was just so...
Yeah. Whatever, ya fucking pussy.
So I drove my ass an hour each way Monday after work to get him to sign a paper selling me the entire contents of the apartment and acknowledging, as the executor and heir, that there would be no return of deposit and that we would not pursue him for his mother's damages to the unit so that I could start cleaning the place out. He returned the keys, that being another legal hurdle I need to have crossed before I can get started reclaiming my property.
With the i's dotted and the t's crossed, I stepped into the belly of the beast on Tuesday morning. Oof.
When you're doing a cleanout such as this one, you start with what I'll call the "soft goods". Shoes, clothes, bedding, drugs (prescription stuff), cosmetics, purses, paper, things that will not rip out a heavy duty contractor trash bag. Empty out closets, dresser drawers, strip bed, pick up all the clothing off the floor. Check pockets of coats (hoarders sometimes leave money there) and pockets of backpacks, purses, cigarette cases, etc. There could be money, so check.
I got thirty-five dollars in quarters plus enough other change to reach the fifty dollar mark. #winning. I also picked up the best part of a 90-count bottle of percocet, script filled 11-05-2025. I think the percs were what killed her, tbh, interacting with the fistful of other medications she was on. She had boatloads of other medications, unused albuterol inhalers and vitamin c pills and stuff for stomach acid and lidocaine patches and a bunch of other shit, all of it delivered by mail, stockpiled in drawers and boxes and bags... but there was just one bottle of percocet and that recent.
Full disclosure: I do not like percocet as a pain killer or a recreational drug. (No, really, they gave me some when I had the hysterectomy and I am not a fan.) However, when ER visits start at a thousand dollars, sometimes it's nice to have actual painkillers that work for real. Maybe we should have a less-broken healthcare system, but until then the percocet can sit in my medicine cabinet in case I need real painkillers.
I took twenty large contractor trash bags of "soft goods" to the drop box on Tuesday. (We have a 30 yard roll-off container for disposing of tenant belongings including furniture and entire apartments of hoarder shit.) I took two wooden dressers (less the drawers, which are useful for schlepping hard goods (things that are heavy or will puncture a trash bag) to the drop box) to the burn pile at home for combustion. No sense paying for disposal when they'll burn for free. I took the couch and the mattress (two sources of odor) to the drop box.
The soft goods have been mostly handled and I can see the floor in multiple places. In clearing out the soft goods, I also found the cat. *sigh* That was depressing.
I got started on the canned goods. The food bank hands out canned goods, so poor tenants have a lot of them. Canned goods are heavy AF and I don't want to schlep them to the drop box because I have to pay to empty that by weight. But I am also not ever going to eat off-brand canned potatoes or canned carrots or cream of chicken soup. I am not hungry enough or poor enough to eat canned peas or canned corn or canned condensed milk. Do not want.
What to do with the canned goods? Lala has four good-sized piggiewigs. They're gonna eat well this week. :) All the food in the apartment (vaguely scented with eau du chat et eau du chien et eau du hand-rolled cigarettes and the nauseating 'essential oils' that the tenant thought magically subtracted the preceding eaus but did nothing more than make the air in the apartment taste funny) goes to enrich the lives of the piggiewigs, ten gallons at a time. Since the hoarder tenant's can opener is for shit, I brought my own in to open the cans. I took ten gallons of cereals and crackers and canned food to the pigs last night and I'll do another ten tonight. (I also cook up the noodles and rice and beans and throw that in the pig buckets too. The pigs are reliably enthusiastic about everything and don't really care what you mix together because they are pigs.)
The canned meats (tuna, chicken) go to Lala's house for the farm kitties and farm doggies.
I am trying to be not-wasteful, here. But fuck, it's still so... much... waste.
You could take the clothes to goodwill!
They reek of cat piss and dog shit and eau du poverty. They are covered in dog hair. They are cheap, fast-fashion shit made of synthetic fabrics. I probably threw away several drums of oil given how much fucking plastic was in those clothes and shoes and purses. My god, there were SO MANY PURSES, all cheap as hell. Well, not all. And there was also one purse, one in the fifty or so that I went through, that was not cheap as hell. It was the one she used regularly, the one with a roll of quarters at the bottom, the one with the bottle of percocet in it, the one that still had a few rollups in the case. That one was real leather and tasteful. Not brand name but decently designed and made of actual real leather, with good solid strap handles. It didn't suck. I may drop that one off at the goodwill. It's nice.
I have more work to do on the apartment, which I'm going to go do now. I also have more thoughts on the apartment, which I will share later.
The hoarder (we are not using names because ordinary citizens have some expectation of privacy, even in death) died in an efficiency (one large room with a kitchenette along one wall, separate bathroom) apartment where she'd lived for several years with her three dogs and cat.
By the time her son found her, she'd been dead a while, two of the dogs were dead, one dog was 'nearly dead' and they could not locate the cat. (It was a very full efficiency apartment and finding one somewhat hostile and reclusive, probably-dead-anyway cat in the... piles of things was a nontrivial matter that the son and constabulary understandably did not wish to undertake.)
Hoarder lived in a 22 unit apartment complex, with neighbors. And yet somehow nobody noticed she hadn't been "around" or thought to call in a wellness check on her. The son told me on the phone that the cops said she'd probably been dead "since Thanksgiving".
They found her last week -- I'm not clear on the date but I got a call from the son on Monday, January 12th -- probably over the weekend. During the "informing the landlord of the death of the hoarder tenant" call, the son emphasized to me that you could smell the apartment from outside the building as if this were some sort of red flag or trigger that should have alerted people to the corpse within in a more urgent and timely manner.
The problem is that the apartment had always reeked as you might reasonably expect a tiny efficiency inhabited by three dogs, a cat, and a less-than-tidy human with a "wee-wee pads" approach to dog toileting to reek. When the door to the unit was opened (she'd crack the door to hand me her portion of the rent, seeing inside was not really feasible), the odor of dog shit, cat piss, and cigarette smoke rolled forth like an almost-visible nauseating wave. What I'm saying here is that the scent of the apartment from outside the apartment was not markedly different after her death from what it was before her death.
At any rate, during that call, the son promised to use the three days off that he got for having a dead parent plus the MLK holiday weekend to clean out the apartment as much as he could, obviously not the furniture because he didn't have a truck, but, like, all the small stuff. And I agreed to allow him the time to do that. It is a small gift I give, letting people pretend that they're gonna do a thing that I know they are 100% not gonna do.
Like, if you've told me six times that there are dog feces on the floor of the apartment in a horrified tone of horror, I know you ain't be the one in there cleaning that shit (lol) up. You go make your adorable little promises and shit, but I know you ain't gonna go in that shithole and fix what your momma did. So on Monday the 19th, I checked in with him to see how he'd made out on the cleaning out the apartment.
Didn't happen. He couldn't bring himself... dog feces... she trashed the place, it was just so...
Yeah. Whatever, ya fucking pussy.
So I drove my ass an hour each way Monday after work to get him to sign a paper selling me the entire contents of the apartment and acknowledging, as the executor and heir, that there would be no return of deposit and that we would not pursue him for his mother's damages to the unit so that I could start cleaning the place out. He returned the keys, that being another legal hurdle I need to have crossed before I can get started reclaiming my property.
With the i's dotted and the t's crossed, I stepped into the belly of the beast on Tuesday morning. Oof.
When you're doing a cleanout such as this one, you start with what I'll call the "soft goods". Shoes, clothes, bedding, drugs (prescription stuff), cosmetics, purses, paper, things that will not rip out a heavy duty contractor trash bag. Empty out closets, dresser drawers, strip bed, pick up all the clothing off the floor. Check pockets of coats (hoarders sometimes leave money there) and pockets of backpacks, purses, cigarette cases, etc. There could be money, so check.
I got thirty-five dollars in quarters plus enough other change to reach the fifty dollar mark. #winning. I also picked up the best part of a 90-count bottle of percocet, script filled 11-05-2025. I think the percs were what killed her, tbh, interacting with the fistful of other medications she was on. She had boatloads of other medications, unused albuterol inhalers and vitamin c pills and stuff for stomach acid and lidocaine patches and a bunch of other shit, all of it delivered by mail, stockpiled in drawers and boxes and bags... but there was just one bottle of percocet and that recent.
Full disclosure: I do not like percocet as a pain killer or a recreational drug. (No, really, they gave me some when I had the hysterectomy and I am not a fan.) However, when ER visits start at a thousand dollars, sometimes it's nice to have actual painkillers that work for real. Maybe we should have a less-broken healthcare system, but until then the percocet can sit in my medicine cabinet in case I need real painkillers.
I took twenty large contractor trash bags of "soft goods" to the drop box on Tuesday. (We have a 30 yard roll-off container for disposing of tenant belongings including furniture and entire apartments of hoarder shit.) I took two wooden dressers (less the drawers, which are useful for schlepping hard goods (things that are heavy or will puncture a trash bag) to the drop box) to the burn pile at home for combustion. No sense paying for disposal when they'll burn for free. I took the couch and the mattress (two sources of odor) to the drop box.
The soft goods have been mostly handled and I can see the floor in multiple places. In clearing out the soft goods, I also found the cat. *sigh* That was depressing.
I got started on the canned goods. The food bank hands out canned goods, so poor tenants have a lot of them. Canned goods are heavy AF and I don't want to schlep them to the drop box because I have to pay to empty that by weight. But I am also not ever going to eat off-brand canned potatoes or canned carrots or cream of chicken soup. I am not hungry enough or poor enough to eat canned peas or canned corn or canned condensed milk. Do not want.
What to do with the canned goods? Lala has four good-sized piggiewigs. They're gonna eat well this week. :) All the food in the apartment (vaguely scented with eau du chat et eau du chien et eau du hand-rolled cigarettes and the nauseating 'essential oils' that the tenant thought magically subtracted the preceding eaus but did nothing more than make the air in the apartment taste funny) goes to enrich the lives of the piggiewigs, ten gallons at a time. Since the hoarder tenant's can opener is for shit, I brought my own in to open the cans. I took ten gallons of cereals and crackers and canned food to the pigs last night and I'll do another ten tonight. (I also cook up the noodles and rice and beans and throw that in the pig buckets too. The pigs are reliably enthusiastic about everything and don't really care what you mix together because they are pigs.)
The canned meats (tuna, chicken) go to Lala's house for the farm kitties and farm doggies.
I am trying to be not-wasteful, here. But fuck, it's still so... much... waste.
You could take the clothes to goodwill!
They reek of cat piss and dog shit and eau du poverty. They are covered in dog hair. They are cheap, fast-fashion shit made of synthetic fabrics. I probably threw away several drums of oil given how much fucking plastic was in those clothes and shoes and purses. My god, there were SO MANY PURSES, all cheap as hell. Well, not all. And there was also one purse, one in the fifty or so that I went through, that was not cheap as hell. It was the one she used regularly, the one with a roll of quarters at the bottom, the one with the bottle of percocet in it, the one that still had a few rollups in the case. That one was real leather and tasteful. Not brand name but decently designed and made of actual real leather, with good solid strap handles. It didn't suck. I may drop that one off at the goodwill. It's nice.
I have more work to do on the apartment, which I'm going to go do now. I also have more thoughts on the apartment, which I will share later.