The Clean Up

My family is buying, cleaning and remodeling a house in Waynesboro. The house was built in 2003. We intend to remodel and finish off the basement with a bedroom, a full bath, and a storage room or office, which would give the house 1,750 square feet of finished floor space.

The family who lived in this house for 20 years were hoarders, at least in their latter years here, and they kept at least one dog and two cats in the house apparently unattended. To make matters worse, they had abandoned the house several months before I first saw it. The pictures on this page show the condition of the house when we first walked in.

The first picture shows the living room and the next three show the kitchen. I did not take pictures of all the rooms of the house. They were in similar condition. But the kitchen was the worst of the rooms of the house.

I have never watched the Hoarder television shows but I'm told this is a bad case of pet hoarders.

On Saturday, July 28, 2023, my two sons, Stephen & Michael, my son-in-law, Hunter, and I entered into the house and started to clean it up. On that day, we filled 60 contractor clean-up bags - the 3 mil heavy duty 42 gallon bags - with everything we found in the house that would fit into them. Besides that, we also hauled all the furniture. Our goal was to get everything out of the house, so we could vacuum it and then rip up the carpet and haul it all to the landfill.

On the next day, we entered again and continued the clean-up. We again filled 60 contractor clean-up bags. Even though it was hard and nasty work, it was very satisfying to see the house begin to emerge from underneath all the junk and crap there. On the second weekend, we started breaking furniture into smaller pieces so we could haul it out the door and place it on the 6'x12' trailer that we rented to pull behind the Uhaul pickup truck. We would also fill the bed of the pickup. That first weekend we made three trips to the landfill. On subsequent days, we would only make two trips to the landfill, as it took us longer to tear down furniture and fill the bags.

By the end of the second day of cleanup, we were able to walk freely on the first floor and we had started to make a dent on the second floor of the house. As you can see from the last two pictures to the right, all the furniture and most of the garbage had been bagged up and removed. The bottom picture is the master bedroom on the first floor. The picture just above that is a view of the living room floor with a peek onto the kitchen floor.