Urine trouble.
A hoarder allegedly left a “ton” of trash as well as several thousand beer bottles that allegedly contain urine behind after abandoning a home in the UK — much to the horror of its new owner.
The Rubbish Removers — who were hired out to clean the mess — found the property in a state of total disrepair.
According to the new owner, he had hoped to sell the property but said it was impossible to do so in its current state.
“You had to duck down to get in the doorways because it was piled up so high. A lot of the bedrooms you couldn’t even get in them,” said Rubbish Removers operations manager Richard Walsh.
“When we got up to the second floor, each bedroom was full to chest height with rubbish — beer bottles, beer cans, food, all sorts.
Walsh, 31, suspects that the previous occupant was an alcoholic due to the sheer number of beer cans and had just stopped putting effort into cleaning.
“I believe it was one man that lived there that unfortunately was an alcoholic and over the years he had been accumulating waste and mess — all the beer cans and bottles,” he said.
“A lot of the bottles had been filled up with urine as well so that was the big issue on the job that made it the hardest to deal with — that was the most shocking part.”
Walsh believes that the filth had accumulated for about 10 to 15 years.
The manager said that it took a team of eight professionals three days to move the trash mountain.
“When you’ve got ten years of rubbish piled on top of each other and you start disturbing the pile the food waste comes up, then the smell of the old beer, which obviously isn’t great and then the urine,” recalled Walsh.
Walsh said that the team moved nearly 16,000 to 20,000 pounds of trash from the two-bedroom home.
“Usually if we’re moving that much waste you’d be moving out of a four or five-bedroom house,” said Walsh.
According to Walsh, the property was one of the toughest projects he and his team tackled due to the amount of trash.
“When we booked the clearance in we had seen some photographs so we sort of knew what we were going into — we do these sorts of clearances often to varying degrees,” said Walsh. “It’s more common than you’d think.”
He explained that “sometimes they’ll just fill one bedroom and then when that gets out of hand, they’ll get in touch but sometimes it goes beyond that to the extent where they’ll be living in one room and the rest of the house will be full of rubbish.”
Walsh said that this house was one of those occasions.
“He was obviously living in the front room and the rest of the house he was using to store stuff,” he suspected.
The clearance team — which prides itself on being non-judgmental — says their main goal is to assist those in need.
“It’s easy to go in there and think ‘oh my god how can someone live like this’ but people do so you have to be compassionate and non-judgemental,” explained Walsh. “Our teams are very good at that. We’re not there to judge anyone, we’re just there to do a job for them. Whether they’re clearing it for themself or a family member it’s obviously a sensitive situation so that’s how we deal with it.”