The taint! I can't remove it!

[Apocalypse Cookie]

Not entirely sure where to put this, but here seems to be the most relevant spot.

Anyway, a little background information. About...oh, a little over a year ago, my mother took up a kind of job cleaning out a house for a friend of hers. This friend had been renting the house out until this point, and decided to try to sell it. But it needed to be cleaned up first. So mom, in turn, took the money she was given to do this job, and split it up among the family according to who did what cleaning jobs (as well as spending some of it on adjustments to the house that we ourselves could not make, such as plumbing - which was a nightmare in and of itself).

The last tenant, the guy we were cleaning up after, had apparently stayed there for a while with his girlfriend. Also apparently, said girlfriend did all the cleaning around the house. This becomes important later.

A few months (or so I hear) before the tenant left, he and his girlfriend split up, and she moved out. Fast-forward to my first day at this house. While there was no clutter, and all the furniture seemed to have been moved out when the house was vacated, the following things were completely and totally disgusting:

- There were dead bugs, specifically roaches, EVERYWHERE (my guess is that the house had been fumigated, but still!);

- There were still various food products left in the pantry, some of them open and likely attracting MORE roaches;

- Some of the kitchen appliances were so caked with cooked-on grease and filth that we could not get it all off - we ended up having to get new burners for the stove, as I recall;

- The windows, window tracks, and sliding door tracks were filthy (I found a live slug in one of the sliding door tracks, though I think it got in there recently, or it wouldn't have been alive);

- The pool was full of algae, and ended up needing to be drained, cleaned, and refilled, as I remember it;

This was just the stuff I witnessed myself; the house was probably even worse before I started helping out. But probably the worst part that I actually had to clean myself was the den fan. The den and kitchen were just about completely open to one another; there was only a counter separating the two, and even then not completely. I don't think he realized that the grease from when he cooked had the ability to float through the air, out of the kitchen, and into the den. Maybe his girlfriend didn't even realize this, I'm not sure. The kitchen fan was actually cleaner than the den fan, though; when I first started cleaning the latter, I had thought that the tops of the fan blades (the side that faces the ceiling so you never normally see it) would be brown, like the sides facing the floor.

WRONG! When I finally managed to get the accumulated layers of grease and dust off, the top of the fan blade was revealed to be painted white! Before then, I literally could not see the actual color. If it actually had been brown, or black, or some other dingy color, it might have been understandable. But white?!

I had my fellow family members try to guess the actual color of the other fan blades without letting them see the first one; they couldn't guess it, either.

[karma_gypsy]

That's just icky . . . my dad's trailer was similar to that as well, before my husband and I took it over (my dad, however, took the trailer back), we put money into it and cleaned it up. We gave it back to him in better condition than he left for us.

The kitchen cabinets were greasy, I had to clean them off and paint them . . . the kitchen floor was all peeling up, so we replaced that with nicer tile, the bathroom floor had rotted through, my husband replaced the wood floor (but didn't replace the tile, didn't get that far), repainted the living room and gave it more color . . . Although personally for me, it's more rewarding when you know you're working on your own home.

[Trishlovesdolphins]

i had the grease problem in my new house. you can see the tops of my cabinets in the kitchen if you go up stairs. i thought it was a dark color. Nope. I SCRAPED at least an INCH off. and it was more over the stove. it was gross. i dunno how long it had been since it was cleaned, but I used 4 bottles of 409 and about 2and a half rolls of paper towels.

[skeptic53]

My father's employer transferred him when I was 9, we moved to another state. The house didn't sell, it was rented out for 4 years. We went back the summer I was 13 to get the place cleaned up to try to sell it.

I had led a pretty sheltered life until then, I'd never seen anything like this. The yard was waist-high weeds. My dad thought the brick patio had been removed, actually it had completely grown over. On the other hand, the side yard, where we'd had raspberry bushes, was completely bare packed dirt. The tenants had kept a big dog there. This dog had clawed a huge hole through the side door into the garage, and from the garage into the laundry room, and the door from the laundry to the kitchen was halfway clawed through. The sheetrock had to be replaced in most of the house due to dog urine. The walls were black from the floor to about 2 feet up. The carpets had to be replaced, the hardwood floor areas had to be stripped and sanded, the vinyl floor in the kitchen had to be replaced. There was a huge amount of trash in the house, dead rats, the stench was horrible. I will spare you the description of the bathrooms. Just seeing/smelling one made my Mom run outside and puke. It took us 2 weeks just to get the place cleaned up to the point where repairs could be made. I had nightmares about it for a couple of years. Our old neighbors had all moved away so no one lived near who still knew us, the condition of the house was a big surprise.

My intro to how trashy some people live.

[phillippbo]

I haven't had to deal with something like this, so I can't relate so much, but I can say that I was surprised at myself the times I've moved out of places I've lived. I had no idea dirt would get into some of the places. I was embarrassed.

On an off topic note, when I read the title of the thread, I thought of something completely different. Is that bad...?

[Apocalypse Cookie]

On an off topic note, when I read the title of the thread, I thought of something completely different. Is that bad...?

To be honest? I'm not sure if it's bad, myself.

[phillippbo]

In case anyone was confused about what I meant when I said that I thought it was something else, follow the link below (no pictures, just a description from the Wikipedia, my best friend).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_%28slang%29

I hope nobody thinks less of me for it, my imagination tends to go right to the "worst" possible meaning for words....

[Apocalypse Cookie]

Think of it however you like (as if I could stop you...right!), but in the title, I was referring more to the fact that I'm never going to be able to look at that house (which I visited a few times in my childhood, and which we still go to on holidays) without seeing roach carcasses scattered across a filthy carpet. And I can never make those memories go away.

...

Without hypnosis or head trauma, that is.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

We bought our house a couple years ago and just recently got around to tearing up the carpet and replacing with hardwood.

Under the carpet, on the particleboard, there were so many pee stains you could not put a nickle down on the floor without it being on a pee stain. We are talking hundreds of pee stains here.

No, my house did not stink, and from the look of the pad, the carpet had not been peed on. From what I can tell, the Pee Apocolypse happened before the carpet got put down.

I can't imagine what the place was like before that. Gaaaah. People are nasty.

Oh, yeah, and I had to clean out the dishwasher with a putty knife, too.

Gaaaah.

[Byronthebanker]

All of the above.

When I bought my house it was an abandoned crack house. Although structurally sound, it was condemned due to the conditions. (talk about getting a deal!).

Truly, to this day I have no idea how people lived here. There were 15 panes of glass broken from the windows, I put on a back door - that was just to secure the place.

There was no heater, and the hot water tank leaked. Also the side of the toilet was broken out.

Oh, did I mention all the rolling papers and melted bodies of Bic pens we found laying around during the remodel? Didn't find any crack though. Actually had the drug dogs come in before starting anything to help make sure nobody would be wanting to come back for their forgotten stash.

The house is a cute bungalow originally built in 1913 in a nice neighborhood in the historic district. Did I mention it was a good deal?

[Blinky]

On an off topic note, when I read the title of the thread, I thought of something completely different. Is that bad...?

LOL..I'm with you on that..I was kinda scared to click on this thread

[Sofar]

I remember a while ago, our parents moved us into this lovely old Italinate Victorian, we don't know when it was built but we do know it was moved to its current location in 1875. Quite a nice house, but the previous owners were not very tidy, and the messes of theirs we had to clean up exhibited some strange behaviors. Notably of which was that for some period of time they kept a motorcycle in one of the upstairs bedrooms, and it seemed every room in the house had once been the home of an especially incontinent dog, or incontinent something with sharp claws. Fortunately, their strange activities only sullied the particle board paneling, drop ceilings and high-traffic carpet that they installed, which was easily removed.

[Dark Psion]

For a time, my mom & dad cleaned houses for Century21. For the most part, it was just haul a little junk and vacume and dust, then they got The House.

The filth was beyond belief, the carpets had to be pulled and taken to the dump, the kitchen was literally burried in old food and dirty dishes, and you don't want to know about the bathroom

The people at Century21 did help and pay them good, but after that one, they were done with cleaning houses.

[Kiwi]

when we moved into the current flat, they didnt clean the oven, or the fridge, or .... the toilet

its not very nice cleaning brown smears off the toilet SEAT!! when you know its from a total stranger (well its not nice at all anyway.... but way worse)

I was so grossed out and angry

[SuperDan]

its not very nice cleaning brown smears off the toilet SEAT!! when you know its from a total stranger (well its not nice at all anyway.... but way worse)

I bet some of my customers lived there!