A 'hoarder' left their house so swamped in trash that it took an eight-strong team days to clear the '10 tonnes' of rubbish and thousands of beer bottles... many filled with urine. House clearance company The Rubbish Removers were called to the property by a customer who had inherited the house from a distant relative.
The new owner hoped to sell the property but had no chance with the state it was in - with rubbish piled up to chest height in most rooms and even to the ceiling in one. Operations manager Richard Walsh was one of eight workers on site for the mammoth clear-up job.
Despite being a relatively small two-bedroom, one-bathroom terraced house, the 31-year-old says that he and his team removed around ten tonnes of waste over the three-day job. Footage from the clear-out shows mounds of waste covering the entire floor and piling up filthy walls - even swamping over an armchair and mattress in two of the rooms.
Richard said: "When we got up to the second floor, each bedroom was full to chest height with rubbish - beer bottles, beer cans, food, all sorts. The entire floor, even the stairs, was full of rubbish. Then there was a third floor where the loft space was and that was absolutely floor to ceiling.
"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. 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.
"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. Going off what we saw on the day I'd say it must have been building up for some years - maybe 10 to 15 years.
"It was shocking and the smell was quite bad. That's something we get used to but this one was particularly bad. 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.
"As we were moving it some of the bottles of urine started breaking and the smell was quite bad. We probably moved between eight and ten tonnes of waste out of a two-bedroom terraced house, which is pretty substantial.
"Usually if we're moving that much waste you'd be moving out of a four or five-bedroom house."
It took eight clearance professionals three days to shift the mountain of rubbish by filling countless tarps and bin bags and loading them into vehicles. The masses of cans and bottles were then taken to a recycling centre, leaving the house completely barren and revealing filthy, damaged walls and floors.
Richard admits that, though a relatively small property, the house was one of the toughest jobs they have tackled due to the sheer amount of waste packed into each room. Richard said: "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.
"But when we got in there it was a bit of a shock. He must have just stopped using the bin and the rubbish piled up inside the house instead. Unfortunately we do find that with older single men it's more common than you'd think.
"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. This case was more like that - he was obviously living in the front room and the rest of the house he was using to store stuff."
The clearance team hope to aid people in moving forward from difficult periods of their life with a compassionate helping hand. Richard said: "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.
"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."
