Note: Updated below.
A tenant in a north Houston apartment complex has an overdue payment for more than a month. No one can get in touch with her. Eventually the bookkeeper goes inside to leave a note. And finds . . . this:
***
The photographer wrote on Saturday:
We cannot get ahold of her, there is still 20% of the residents out from the hurricane. My manager is FREAKING out.
The pictures dont show the amount of FLEAS inside im STILL scratching
The tenant’s two cats have been found, safe with a neighbor.
Is it just a horrible mess? Or something . . . more? Lou Minatti decides:
I am so proud that a Houstonian has created such a masterpiece! The way the cigarette butts are arranged… it’s almost like performance art.
Update: More photos. Even worse.
- How can anyone live like this? (pics) [Houston-Imports]
- One of the most amazing things I have ever seen. [Lou Minatti]
Photos: Houston-Imports Forum user Avex Hype
It’s actually a viral ad for Whataburger.
LOL! A viral ad for Whataburger, Domino’s Pizza and Marlboro cigarettes!
I am so glad I haven’t eaten any lunch yet, cause those pictures would have made it all come right back up… Eeeew.
You know, at some point this person had to realize this was getting out of hand……
It’s like when a 300+ lb person finally realizes they need to do something about their weight. At some point you couldn’t see your shoes or it was difficult to move around.
I feel sorry for the neighbors. Having tenant like this causes lots of problems for neighbors such as roaches.
The Resolve bottle on the coffee table is almost comical. What was she going to use that for? Cleaning? ha!
I like the Resolve Carpet Cleaner on the table.
Why couldn’t this be the Neighborhood Guessing Game?!
maybe this person wanted to document every meal they have had for the last several months.
also… do you think the person irons? The ironing board seems to be clear of debris…
Look mom, I’m NOT the messiest person ever!
I’ll forward this jump to my 24 y/o son who may be the Oscar Madison of the South Loop 610 area. Suddenly, he looks more like Felix Unger.
ZOMG, that’s the greatest piece of installation art evah!!! It’s obviously a trenchant comment on the excess consumption that confronts us, so-called civilized humans, on a daily basis. The juxtaposition of the Resolve cleaning bottle within the mass of debris represents the futility that one often feels as the onslaught of corporate mass media constantly washes over us. The hopeless sentinels of the cleaning products overlooking the chaos of the bathroom is particularly compelling.
Looks like an online addict, see how the main keyboard letters are clear, and the clean spot on the spacebar? I think she’s keeping up appearances for the outside world, hence the clear ironing board but is depressed and has lost all self-respect so doesn’t take care of her immediate environment. Poor thing. I guess we’ll never know.
Yikes. That’s a terrible case of OCD hoarding. She’s a very sick person. It’s a horrible illness to have, but it’s also a health hazard for the people around her.
What apartment complex is this located in?
Jeez! My place is a mess, but I feel like a clean freak after this! The article says the woman — OBVIOUSLY disturbed in some way (depression, OCD)…this isn’t a garden-variety pigpen here — has been missing a month. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised that they clean the apartment and find her. Not dead, just couldn’t find her way out of the apartment. Yikes.
I like antenna on the tv. Better get that changed before 2009 haha
People that have been in the apartment management business for very long have usually seen worse. Imagine an active colony of 37 inbred cats living with an elderly woman in a one-bedroom unit. Imagine a ledge of dried feces physically adhering the bed to the side of the wall, or the layers of newspapers over feces four inches thick over the carpet floor. Imagine half-inch-long ticks crawling up the interior walls. Imagine a congealed puddle of vomit that was acidic enough to partially disolve or melt some exposed carpet.
DUDE SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS WERID GIRL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How would one go about abating this – call an industrial janitorial service that has a hasmat crew or just cut your losses, nail up the doors and pump concrete in through the windows?
my mom goes to this web when she wants me to clean
UMMMMM…… WELL I DONT KNOW WHERE 2 START BUT I LOVE THE CONDOM THAT LAYIN ON THE RESTROOM FLOOR :) VIVA WHATERBUGER
what a mess!i have seen some messy places but nothing quite so bad. Make me an offer to clean it up!!!!!!!
Nice!! I bet they are overweight, depressed, and smell bad. Every once a year my wife finds a tenent like this but not this bad.
I am a guy, but I understand her. One just does not think about things like ash tray, trash can, washing dishes, and that means you don’t need to spend your time on this. May be she is a cosmologist developing new string theory and her mind is very occupied to spend time on cleaning. The mess should not affect you and you’ll be OK. When it became close to impossible to live/find things – she moved. Lost a security deposit – but what a big deal, for lots of time saved!
Hey quit looking at my house i just have not made it back from the hurricane evacuation/ vacation/ running from copper since it loos like they made some nice meth in thevtub
I’ve seen this in several e-mails, usually w. a slightly different story.
I think it’s either a protest & was just placed here by an angry renter, or it’s an “artistic display†of some sort. I used to be in property management, and there are a few things missing here. Look closer (and pull up this same group of pix elsewhere on the net): There should be grime around the light switch – there is not.There should be a big layer of filth on the blinds – there is not. The blind cord would be filthy – it is not. The walls are very very clean & white. They should be smudgy. In another set of these pictures, the kitchen cabinets are completely clean, no grime at the door knobs, no grime at the drawer pulls. Trust me – in this much filth, you would see that grime. ALSO – the big piles of cigarette butts were obviously dumped there. When you put out a cigarette, there is a smashing action. You don’t just throw a still burning cigarette on top of a giant pile of other cigarettes.
MAYBE this person worked in a bar & collected a weeks worth of cigarettes & dumped them throughout the house……maybe…..
But the whole thing looks staged to me – big time.
“There should be grime around the light switch – there is not.There should be a big layer of filth on the blinds – there is not. The blind cord would be filthy – it is not. The walls are very very clean & white. ”
I think maybe they didn’t live there long enough for the stuff to get to that point. There are certainly old stains on the carpet and the couch.
If you live somewhere for a month and never throw ANYTHING away, it can look like this. In fact, a crackhead couple stole my car and live in it for 36 hours and it looked almost exactly like this. Old fast food bags with some food left in them, cups, cigarette butts, stinky clothes. And the smell, OMG the smell. After just 36 hours.
I took it to the carwash and told them to throw everything not nailed down away and to steam clean as best they could.
Leasing agent: “We have a lot of great floor plans here at The Hideaway at Oak Ridge. There’s the Azalea, the Live Oak, the Grey Gardens … “
I’m with Emme. Pretty much all those things KW mentioned take a long time to build up, but all of the mess in the pictures could happen quickly if you never threw anything away. Leaving your TC bags all over the floor won’t make the grime build up around the light switch any faster.
i also think the walls, switches and cabinets could stay clean while the rest of the garbage piled up. the woman apparently ironed her clothes, so she might not have been dirty herself, and the cigarette butts do look like they were dumped, but probably out of whatever she was using as an ashtray when it got full. with that much fast food going on, i bet the kitchen cabinets are unused and that’s how they stayed clean. in fact, i bet the stove is clean.
I like the bottle of Resolve carpet cleaner…at least she had good intentions, lol
Well, I don’t know if this is staged or what, but I teach 7th grade English and my students have had a BLAST writing a descriptive paper about this apartment! They were in major gross-out mode…I got lots of good adjectives out of them!
Maybe this could be used for some Anti-Smoking campaigns.
omg wtf why would somone live like this
ok someone who lived there should have called sooner to complain! i am right this minute writing a school paper on it! ugh!
I was wondering where my ex girlfriend Julie had moved to. I’m glad to see that she’s ok. But where are her 2 little girls?
Clare said:
“Well, I don’t know if this is staged or what, but I teach 7th grade English and my students have had a BLAST writing a descriptive paper about this apartment! They were in major gross-out mode…I got lots of good adjectives out of them!”
Clare, I’m a big fan of English teachers and especially those who use creative ways to get kids excited about descriptive language. So I don’t want to make you feel bad, but…
In using these pictures, I hope that you also treated this situation with some sensitivity. If you had your class write about a situation with an alcoholic, you probably would have kept in mind that some of your students have alcoholic parents. Well, there is a very good chance that a child in your class has a parent who is a hoarder.
No one would ever know – children of hoarders are often very well dressed and high achievers – but they never invite friends over to their house because they are so ashamed. When they saw the photos, they probably laughed and squealed with the other kids – but were dying from shame and embarrassment inside.
My sister and I were honor-roll kids with impressive resumes. Yet we lived without heat or water for months at a time because my mom was too embarrassed by her hoard to call the repairman. We lived with 5-foot high stacks of moldy newspapers. But we were lucky – my mom never got so bad that she hoarded animals, or food waste. When she died, it took us 3 months to clean out the place. We found her missing diamond wedding ring in her old desk, among rotting rubber bands and rusty paper clips.
The person with this apartment is obviously very ill.
Studies have shown that there is no link between hoarding behaviors and how much or how little you grew up with. It is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, and just like other forms of OCD, it has to do with brain chemistry. Hoarders have brain abnormalities that actually can be seen and measured (see: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040603070801.htm)
However, the underlying problem can be triggered or made worse by an event. For example, just like a drug addict may be more likely to go on a bender during a stressful time, my mom’s hoarding behavior became more severe after my dad died.
Hoarding is notoriously tough to treat. Hoarders don’t respond to many of the drugs that are usually used to treat OCD. I wish that there WERE a magic pill I could pop to help me with my hoarding tendencies (for example, like a person with ADHD has problems focusing on schoolwork, I have problems categorizing objects and assigning them their actual value. That is why severe hoarders think that food wrappers and cigarette butts are somehow valuable and shouldn’t be thrown out).
Riluzole, which is a medication used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the few medications that may show some promise (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050729224439.htm) I just happened to find out about this because my mom died of Lou Gehrig’s. In the last months of her life while she was taking the Riluzole, she allowed us to throw away ten years of newspaper stacks without a whisper of protest, which stunned us.
There are professional organizers and cleaning companies who are actually trained in dealing with hoarders. More info at: http://www.childrenofhoarders.com/coh49.php
Many landlords have to turn to hazmat crews – the companies that clean up after floods and fires.
im trausmetized
This person is obviously a “compulsive hoarder” A&E network has a week TV show titled “Hoarders” on Monday evenings. There are an estimated 3-6 million people with this mental disorder in the U.S.
Ok just looking at her bathroom just made me sick. That apartment book keeper sure is brave to enter and take pictures with that strong odor.
this is a perfect example of how my mother was as we were growing up and still is today. it is heart breaking to see that there are others that live like this too. i no longer live with my mother of corse but when i did i never had people over or even had anyone drop me off at my house because of the fear that they would ask to use the restroom or get a drink. my brother and i kept our rooms clean i made sure of that, but my mother would just make her way in there and trash it. i dont know how we were never taken from her. she is still like this today my 2 year old son and my boufriend which i hace know since middle school have never set foot in her home and hopefully never will. i have tried to help her clean many times but ut never last and im tired of helping. i dont know if i feel this is a serious problem or just laziness at this point, but it has diffently scared me as a person. i find my self double cleaning counters or not being able to sleep if there is even one dish in the sink……
Just like my renter, complains about not making rent but all the while has packages sent to the house. mmmmm.
You’re all wrong. These are stills from the upcoming MGM summer blockbuster, Gone with the Trash.
Thats so gross! Reminds me of what I can imagine a poor estate would be like inside!