Our elderly neighbor has not been living in her house for the past five years. During that time we have offered to help her sell her house. We’ve offered to help her clean out her house so she can do something with it. We’ve offered to rent her house. She was not interested in any of those offers and would always say, I’m just going to give you my house. Which seemed drastic, but also just seemed like something she liked to say. In the meantime, we mowed her yard and Andy was always the one she called when she had any issues with the outside of her property. Then last week, out of the blue, our elderly neighbor went to her lawyer and signed her house over to my husband. Free gift. 

Now, we have never been in our neighbor’s house. We have lived next door for seventeen years and have been very curious, but our friendship and interactions always happened outside in the yard, never in a house. So, when Andy came home with the keys, we all trooped over to satisfy our curiosity. And then we discovered why the house has been empty for five years and why there was so much reluctance to do anything with it. 

It is a hoarder house. We had to push things out of the way to open the door, and we were walking on trash about four feet deep throughout the entire house. The house was built in 1920 and has never been updated. The house has good bones and is worth fixing, but everything needs to be fixed. 

The trash is overwhelming and Andy and I feel an urgency to get it cleaned out. After that, I’m not sure what the next step will be. On Saturday Andy went and cleaned out half a bedroom. He filled his trailer in only a couple hours. On Sunday, he started pulling all the scrap metal out of the basement and so far has made two large piles of metal by the alley which have been picked up by metal scrappers who drive by regularly. This evening I went over and helped him. We worked maybe an hour and half and filled up the trailer with trash again. He got one bedroom mostly cleaned out and I made it halfway down the hallway. My goal is to make a path to the front door so we can start using the front door. Right now we’re having to come up from the walk-out basement. 

It’s definitely an interesting project. Also gross. By some minor miracle there are no obvious signs of mice and roaches and bugs. I imagine the fact that the house has been closed up for five years contributed to this. I can tell you that if it was full of roaches, I would not be helping my husband. As it was, I still had to take breathing breaks and stand by the open window. The bottom layer of the hallway had mail and newspaper from 2002, and I presume that this stuff has been sitting there that long. 

I’ve decided to write about this whole process because I think posting pictures of our progress will be encouraging and motivating for us. I’ve also got lots of thoughts about our society and what has to go wrong for people to end up in these living situations. I’ll write more and try to let this blog be a place where we can watch chaos turn into order.