Ambrosia Software Web Board: And you thought *you* were messy? - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Found this little tidbit on Geekologie - had to share it:







And so many more if you follow the link...

http://www.houston-i...irty/dirty.html

Hrrrm. Page seems intermittent... try refreshing if you can't see the pics

That's gross. How can someone live like that?

I notice a Schlotsky's bag, at least they have good taste.

Dammit, I thought I had gotten rid of all those pictures.

Smoking kills (da laydeez).

This makes me want to clean my room...

While that bathroom is probably as bad as any I've seen (looks like he just gave up on using the toilet there), the rest of the apartment is no worse (and a fair bit better in some ways) than a number that I've been in as an apartment maintenance guy.

One of the complexes we managed had a single, mentally ill guy who kept a couple vicious dogs locked up in his back bedroom (this is a running theme: nearly all of our super-squalor cases revolve around either a single, crazy dude with dogs; or a single, old, crazy woman with cats). From what we could get from the neighbors, at the beginning, he would take them on walks and feed them actual dog food. As time went on, he stopped bringing them out of the house, and then stopped bringing them out of the bedroom. This coincided with him starting to only feed the dogs his own food scraps and the occasional neighborhood cat, then just garbage from the dumpsters (which is apparently what he was eating as well by that point). By and by, he stopped leaving the apartment altogether and forgot about the dogs, at which point the larger of the two tried to eat the other dog before dying himself.

Eventually, the guy ended up being taken to the hospital where he died. The owner of that particular complex called us up to go repaint the joint and get it ready to be rented again. When we went in, the place was pretty ######ed up with large piles of garbage all over the place. It wasn't any worse than a lot of this owner's s###holes though, except for a horrible stench that set us gagging as soon as we went in. We had to shovel through a few piles of stuff before we could get to the door of the back bedroom (frankly, I was dreading finding a dead person in there) and were able to locate the source of the stench: the rotting remains of two dogs amidst heaps of half-eaten garbage and remains of half-eaten neighborhood cats, all in the midst of a solid foot of dog s###.

We decided that this was a job for someone else (after my partner added a pile of vomit to the floor of the back bedroom) and told the owner that it wasn't worth it. He got pissed off and decided that we were a bunch of pussies, so he and his wife went down there themselves with a mop and some trash bags that weekend. Turns out that - surprise, surprise - we actually know what we're talking about. His wife didn't make it more than a couple feet inside before she went running out, and the mere liquid artifacts that had flown under the bedroom door were enough for him to give up. To this day, I'm not sure who the hell he got to clean that joint up, but I'm fairly certain that they weren't paid enough.

-Pufer

Pufer, on Sep 23 2008, 01:53 PM, said:

As usual, Pufer wins.

Pufer, on Sep 23 2008, 04:53 PM, said:

That's freaking awesome.

There was a topic about this like... 4 or 5 years ago - I was amazed to find that someone dedicated a whole webpage to it!

I don't know if it's a fabrication or if it's real, but it actually doesn't seem that far gone judging by the stuff we've seen so far... This was one of the funniest stories I'd read in years.

Sh**ty Roommate

Oh, you need to fix the link btw - the boards perma-neutered it lol.

This post has been edited by Shrout1: 24 September 2008 - 06:20 AM

That's one of the most awful stories I've read in a long time. I don't know if it's real or not, I just know that it's real bad.

Not safe for work or human consumption, in other words.

Pufer, on Sep 23 2008, 08:53 PM, said:

Cases like that usually end up with forensic cleaners. They charge quite a lot of money; on the other hand, they have the protective clothing, breathing gear and so forth needed to handle biohazard situations. And when it gets to that level, "biohazard" is no exaggeration.

People who let their houses reach such a state usually have serious mental health issues, often including suspicion of and/or hostility towards strangers. This makes them very difficult to help; without serious psychological treatment (and many of them resist treatment), even if their home is cleaned, they're likely to end up fouling it again.

Sundered Angel, on Sep 24 2008, 09:56 PM, said:

No way the owner in question ponied up for anything like that. My bet is he found some illegal immigrant day workers and supplied them with a lot of bleach. We've shoveled s### and yanked urine-soaked rugs before, we just don't like doing it, so would only do so with our more valued clients (or our own complexes). Worse case scenario, you have to replace a couple feet of sheetrock, bleach it up, use liberal amounts of natron (or soda ash or other stuff like that) and some heavy chemical cleaner, and let it air out for quite a while (which is all that forensic cleaners do). With that owner, removing the s###, bleaching the floor, and replacing the carpet would be sufficient. The types of people he rents to aren't the types of folks who would worry much about why that back bedroom always smells so bad when it gets hot inside (the types of neighbors who would notice - not to mention smell - what this guy was doing to himself and not give a s### aren't the choicest folks around).

Short of cleaning up meth labs, I don't think I've ever seen a forensic cleaner used by any landlord I've ever met, no matter how ######ed up the place is. Seriously, the place that started this topic isn't very bad at all and would be maybe a week turnaround, at most (depending on how bad it is under the piles of stuff, with most of the time spent taking loads of garbage to the dump). With the slumlord, we'd remove most of the garbage and hit the bathroom with a power washer - a couple, maybe three days max (doing nothing more than removing the garbage, it would qualify as one of his nicest units, by far).

-Pufer

*vomit*

Vell-os, on Sep 25 2008, 06:54 AM, said:

I hope you're gonna clear that up.

Jeremiah, on Sep 25 2008, 05:15 PM, said:

I did. I can't not do that after seeing those pictures.

Ew.

Pufer, on Sep 23 2008, 08:53 PM, said:

I just feel sorry for whoever rented that apartment after it got "cleaned". I bet it wasn't mentioned in the estate agent's tour...

Lektor, on Sep 30 2008, 01:26 PM, said:

I think my dear old dad rented that one out (he usually does for that complex, under orders that the only qualification for getting the keys be that you have the first month's rent and are just sober enough to sign your name on a lease). If he did, there's no way the previous tenant's use of the back bedroom was mentioned. If he didn't, none of our other rental agents would've known anything about the previous tenant's use of the back bedroom to tell the new tenant.

Of all the folks I've shown apartments to over the years, I can only ever recall one person asking about who lived there before them (if I remember correctly it was a young couple with a kid, with the previous tenants being a young couple with a kid who left because they had another kid).

-Pufer

i joined a FaceBook group for the people in my flat, and made friends with the last people to live in my apartment, does that count?

Shrout1, on Sep 23 2008, 10:59 AM, said:

Holy crap. Someone takes pictures of this place?

Lektor said:

Speaking of Facebook, I noticed Ambrosia didn't have a page you could become a fan of. I was disappointed.

This post has been edited by Sponge Tom: 16 October 2008 - 08:25 PM

Did the celebrated shrout leave already?
ah well...

on topic: Gross

Sponge Tom, on Oct 17 2008, 02:23 AM, said:

No, but there is a Group you can join, it was around before the days of these new fangeld fan site thingys.