Yesterday we gave a hand at the clearing of the tip. It was once a house, rather a nice little one on a neighboring farm, but the bloke who was living there had reduced it to a place where even flies battered themselves to death trying to escape. It was upsetting not only for filth and stench and abysmal hygenic standards, but also for the wastage (which REALLY offends every ounce of my Calvinist soul). Obviously considerable money flowed into the house, and though tens of thousands were wasted on booze and drugs, it was also wasted in every direction - there must have been 10 good pen-knives under the piles of dropped dirty clothing (some rat-eaten and rotting) and discarded plates and half-eaten food. A fridge that had got too filthy even for this... lifeform wasn't cleaned out, or even thrown out. It was just closed and left running, and he got another. The stench was really unbelievable. There were dead rats, rotten potatoes (on the same shelf as new food had been put!) and used condoms on the floor (one has to wonder what kind of girl would get that close!). It was the sort of thing I imagined with heroin addicts in the grungy inner city, not out in our beautiful country.
It took spades, rakes and strong stomachs to clean it out. As commendation to giving your head to the local weed... NOT.
Ugh, you have my sympathies. That sounds more appalling by a fridge than the dump one of my Moms co-workers lived in. Said co-worker had cancer and claimed the place had gotten bad because she wasn't able to keep up with the cleaning. Coworker was going to be getting a marrow transplant in a few months and needed her place sanitized first.
ReplyDeleteIt was a small house and thinking it would take at most two afternoons to clean Mom volunteered herself, me, both my sisters, and my brother to do the job. I'm fairly sure the place wasn't as much as vacuumed once in the decade plus the woman owned it. It ended up taking about 10 days and upwards of 200 large trashbags before the place was improved to being barely livable.
Sadly in the year or two between then and her death she managed to completely trash it again. The second time it was the banks problem since her siblings just mailed them the key. I wonder if they actually paid someone to clean it; or just wrote off their losses and bulldozed it.
I would say bulldozed would be the right answer for this one too. The issue of course is the ludicrous building costs in Oz and the buerocatic nightmare. :-(
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