When people hunt down a great new home to call their own they usually just have to do some straightforward renovations and repairs to make it livable, turning it into the
But where does a new homeowner begin when they're renovating a hoarder's house?
Sue and John Fogwell knew they'd have their work cut out for them when they bought an old ivy covered house in Philadelphia's Main Line neighborhood, since the hoarder owner had left all of his stuff behind when he moved out four years earlier.
"The first thing we saw was floor-to-ceiling containers that would usually be in a garage to hold nuts and bolts," Sue says. Next to that, endless piles of cassettes, tapes, magazines, and more. "It was just wild. Every inch of space was covered."
Luckily, the man wasn't a heap of trash kind of hoarder, but the man's "collection" was so massive it couldn't be contained inside the house:
"I was suffocating in the house, so I excused myself and went outside. That's when I saw it: what I guesstimated to be about 1,000 plastic bins. Full with junk and totally covering the backyard." Every fencepost had a spotlight, so Bill could keep an eye on his bins at night. There was a (working!) phone attached to a tree and wires hanging everywhere.
It took them nine months to clean out the house, but here's the kicker- the owner who had amassed the hoard had to watch over the entire process, making the clutter the least of their problems.
Read more from We Bought (And Cleaned Out) A Hoarder's House here
How do they pay for the house when they don't go to work for nine months?