Selling a Hoarder's House
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Anonymous
Have social services and the county take her away |
Anonymous
You can try calling the county Health Department in the area where the hoarder lives and find out what it takes to have the house condemned--i.e., what's considered unfit for human habitation. I am the PP who has been through a clean-up, and I called the health department anonymously without reporting my relative. More of a "If I were to make a formal report, what would happen?" conversation. It was very useful--just for myself to know, but also to be able to say, "If you try to move back into the house without a working furnace, I will call the health department and they will condemn the house." I highly recommend that whenever the time comes you find a hoarding clean up company. We couldn't have done it without one. The enormity of the task is just not something you can understand until you're in it--both physically and emotionally. |
Anonymous
Cost to abandon can mean many things, there are plenty of spots close in and near metro with marginal value like most of PG and parts of MoCo like East of the Pike Rockville and Silver Spring. |
Anonymous
did you read the part about significant leaks and mold that they can see? I'm sure what they CAN'T see is far worse |
Anonymous
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OP, my mom is a hoarder and we faced this when we moved her to assisted living. Amazingly, despite the fact that he house was old (1920s) and had not been repaired or maintained much since 1966, once we moved her stuff out, the bones were still good. It took about 70k of work on a house that is now worth about 650k, so it was worth ther investment. It was so emotional to see the hovel I grew up in as a showpiece, with new fixtures and crown moldings and all of the plaster walls that had been full of chips, gaping holes, and mold replaced with perfect drywall. Even the original floors were salvageable, with some barely noticeable stains after refinishing dark. Kind of heartbreaking really to see what might have been.
Just to give you some hope - it might not be as bad as you think! |
Anonymous
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Thanks for posting. My dad is a hoarder and my mom is an enabler. They barely have done work in their house in 30 years. (A 20 year collection of empty soda bottles and broken furniture/knick knacks get in the way.. I found canned food from 1988...) they are getting older I worry about it...
And selfishly, what to do with their disgusting house when they can't live there anymore. How do you get your mom out of the house to clean or even get people to see the house for tear down? |
Anonymous
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Thanks everyone for our advice, and it's comforting to know that others have been through this as well.
The house is less than a mile from the Bethesda and Chevy Chase Metro stops. It's a desirable location and there has been a lot of tear down in the neighborhood in the past 10-15 years. The house is floor to ceiling full of stuff. None of the bathrooms are fully functional (you shower in one bathroom and use the toilet in another). Kitchen and bathroom fixtures are 25+ years old. The basement actively leaks and my mom has been collecting water in buckets and dumping them out. The basement is so moldy that you have to wear a mask to go down there. My mom said that they asked a plumber to come in to evaluate the leak situation years ago but he couldn't access anything due to the stuff. My dad was not transparent in his finances and now that we have spent weeks doing forensic accounting, we have to sell the house, reduce expenses and use the proceeds of the house so that my mom can have some assets to live on for the next 20+ years (she's in her mid-60s). We did talk to a realtor who is a friend and she suggested we get the stuff out so that we could get a better assessment on the state of the house. The monumental task of cleaning this up is overwhelming and in the past, my mom has been non cooperative in throwing anything out. Sadly, most of it is not valuable stuff but just newspapers, paper bags, take out containers, old furniture, samples from my mom's import/export business and other stuff that we would throw out in our weekly trash pick up. I do have one brother who is working overseas so the onus will be one me to get this cleaned up. We should have intervened years ago - things really deteriorated when my brother and I moved out of the house. |
Anonymous
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Sorry OP. And don't feel badly about not intervening. It wouldn't have helped.
The worst is throwing away bags of old coffee cans and junk mail dating to 1974, only to find it hauled back into the house. Ugh. |
Anonymous
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No just don't bother. We sold a house that had a long-term tenant hoarder. Called 1-800-got-junk to clear it out and weirdly one of the workers made on offer on the house as is. Got a lawyer and a contract together and sold the thing as-is.
My advice is to not put any time or effort into it and sell it as-is....stuff included. An investor will jump on that 1 mile from the metro. |
Anonymous
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22:28 here, OP. Some advice on starting the cleanup. My mom was in her late 60's, too. Strangely enough, once the reality set in that she was moving to a new place, her attachment to the piles of sale papers from the 1980's that she still wanted to go through sort of miraculously disappeared.
What helped was getting her out of the house, physically, and making a written agreement with her about what she would agree to part with. We made a solemn vow not to discard anything outside of the categories she agreed to, and we stuck to it. What we agreed to preserve for her to sort through herself: * Any photographs at all (we threw away a lot of rotted frames though) * All of her clothes * Any of my deceased dad's cotton shirts or sweaters that were not stained (she had ideas that she would make a quilt out of them, even though she has never sewn in her life) * Anything that was on her bedroom dresser that did not fall into an agreed-upon "garbage" category Garbage categories that she agreed to let us dispose: * All upholstered furniture (we bought her new furniture for her new place except for my dad's favorite armchair) * All food items including food containers * All old newspapers * All paper towels, plastic bags, and anything that had touched food or was moldy * All magazines Books required some finesse and negotiation, but once we had cleaned everything else out WITHOUT her there, books weren't so bad. The other key was we NEVER allowed her back into the house once we had started the cleaning. We moved some of her favorite things to her new place, which we had already furnished with the basics. So she had some familiar things to start with. Then we just added more that was not totally ruined. But she never, ever saw the place again once we started throwing things away. She wouldn't have been able to handle it. |
Anonymous
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I disagree with the realtor who said to clean it up first. Based on what you said about the mold, 25 year old appliances, etc, I wouldn't waste another cent on the clean-up.
I would post it on Craigslist and every neighborhood listserv you can think of as well as signs in the yard and fliers in local stores. You can advertise "as is" and say the value is in the land and it is a teardown, no showings necessary b/cs of inside condition. Have your mom get out the stuff she wants and let the builder/investor take care of removing the clutter. They will probably just bulldoze it with all of the stuff inside. Don't use a realtor (save yourself the 6%). You can also contact local builders and get them bidding against each other. |
Anonymous
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Nothing can be harder than selling a house owned by a hoarder. Different issues and costs can have tremendous effects in selling the house.
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Anonymous
Now I've got that jingle in my head. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
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I had to clean out my hoarder dad's house. As a PP said, rent a construction-sized dumpster.
The issue with going through everything is that you get decision fatigue. If I had to do it again, I'd cut to the following idea: It is worth throwing away some things that might not be worthless, just to save you the hell of trying to FIND those things that are not worthless. So what I mean is, if it's not a photo album, money, or jewelry/paintings, throw it out. Fixing/reselling furniture is hell. A garage sale is hell and is it really worth 1K or so? Just put it by the curb. Finally, if you have a sibling(s) that you have a good working relationship with, it's more "fun" to knock out that project together than alone. I'm female and my older brother and I just went to that house and worked like dogs for FIVE construction dumpster's worth of crap. BTW we then dealt with the mold and had family friends move in. They paid us nominal rent and fixed up the place while they lived in it. |