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My name is Gerri, and this is my house.
People throw away a lot of things.
But I don't.
I got everything in there.
Oh, yeah, I'm a hoarder.
I'm Rodger Stank, and I've been living in this house
for over 50 years.
I didn't think that I was a hoarder.
But apparently, I must be because you look around
and see all this stuff around here.
Yes, I guess you could say I must have
been a hoarder of some kind.
But most of that stuff that is inside the house
would more than likely be my wife's stuff.
GERRI: Rodger's more of a hoarder than I am.
He brings the stuff.
But he doesn't bring it in.
He leaves it outside.
My wife has fallen picking things up.
She seems to more or less leave it--
leave it wherever it is.
And I have to kind of stumble over it and all that stuff.
I'm Jay.
And Rodger and Gerri are my parents.
For as long as I can remember, my parents
have had quite a bit of things.
I've helped them clean many times.
But the minute I left, a week or two later, it was all back,
just different.
It just kept coming back.
It's almost like-- it's almost like standing on a beach
and trying to hold back a wave.
My name is Eric.
I'm an inspector with the city of Milwaukee, Department
of Neighborhood Services.
At my first inspection of the property,
I noted that the yard was filled to a height of between 6
and 10 feet with material.
When I looked at the house closer,
I could see second floor and first floor windows completely
filled with material.
And that gave me the idea that the inside of the house
might be as full as the yard was.
RODGER: My wife received a courtesy phone call
from someone that works for the city,
that they're going to come with the police department.
And they were going to come in the house.
They had the police department in the house, the building
inspection department traipsing through
and knocking things down.
ERIC: Only three rooms in the house were accessible to me.
The others were completely filled with debris, including
the bathroom and the kitchen.
These are basic necessities in a home,
and they need to be accessible.
I declared the property to be uninhabitable.
This here building inspector is a real hardass.
He is my God now.
All right.
Good morning, everybody.
ALL: Good morning.
My name is Matt Paxton.
I'm an extreme cleaning specialist.
I mean, I've done over 2,000 houses now in my career.
And this is top five, most full houses I've ever seen.
This is from the city.
It is our directive of what we have to clean up, all right?
Item by item.
My ultimate goal is to get the yard cleaned
and then get in the house and have a three-foot pathway
from door to door.
That is the bare minimum standard of living
that the city will approve.
OK. Fine.
All right. Everybody, we ready?
ALL: Yeah. - All right.
Let's do it.
So far, it's going very well.
We have filled an entire dumpster in the first hour.
RODGER: Look at that.
50 years of acquiring of stuff, suddenly in a dumpster,
on its way to be thrown away.
What do you think about that?
Amazing how they can do all that work.
Rodger is willing to do everything he needs
to to get back into this home.
Gerri, on the other hand--
No, no, wait, hand me--
--is slowing up the process.
I'm going to keep that.
I got to put that on my bed.
Yeah, looks like I got all kinds of things in here.
She's picking up every single item.
I'll keep this.
'Cause I need to tell you, pretty
much 99% of that needs to go.
Remember, this whole thing has to be swept clean for you
to keep this house--
like, everything.
Here, you can get rid of this.
Here.
Gerri, can we throw this away?
No, a different bag.
It's wet, and it has rat droppings on it.
It doesn't have rat droppings.
It's just moldy.
Now it has mold on it.
And you're touching it with your bare hands.
Yeah.
OK, so let's put the garbage in the bag.
This is pretty cool, though.
Gerri, we can't go at this pace.
There's no way.
She still could not grasp that if she doesn't pick up
the pace, there's no way we are going
to get through the side yard.
Can this bucket go?
I didn't look in the bottom.
I don't know what the hell's on the bottom.
OK, so what happens when you lose the house on Tuesday?
I hope I don't.
But I'm telling you, you're going to.
DR. ZASIO: At this rate, you're going to.
Do what you want to do.
I don't care.
Gerri, we know this is hard for you.
No, you don't.
Yes, we do.
But we're trying to develop a system that's
going to get your house back.
As gentle as I was with her--
A lot of knitting, a lot of other things in here.
--I'm not getting anywhere.
Yeah, I'm hurrying through them.
You need to come to some reality here.
You haven't used this stuff in 20-some years.
You don't know it was there.
Had you not seen it, you wouldn't have even missed it.
And you think you're going to live to be 150.
You know, I just feel like walking away right now.
That's what I feel--
I'm to that point.
There's 4,000 more of these boxes in there.
And I'm not-- if I go through it like this,
I'm not going to be able to clean your house out.
That's an antique. WOMAN: We'll pick it up, Rodger.
Don't worry. - Believe it or not.
[sighs] Gerri, look at me.
If we pick through it like this, one on one,
we will not finish your house.
It's not possible.
You will lose your house tomorrow.
I'm telling you right now.
Yeah, I'm hearing you.
Y'all need to make a decision.
Do you want to let us take over?
And some stuff that you like is absolutely
going to get thrown away.
That's absolutely what's going to happen.
But we'll have a chance to save the house.
You have to let me throw stuff away that you're
not even going to see.
You're going to have to trust that I'm
pulling this stuff out.
Here's the deal.
We've got to stop picking and start tossing.
That's what we're at.
It is your choice.
I can do my job or not do my job.
If I'm not going to do my job, I'm going to pull my crew.
Have them go ahead and do their job.
The decision is here.
Are we going to move forward, let Matt's crew do their job?
Or do we walk?
Do what you want to do.
I don't give a [bleep].
DR. ZASIO: OK. Rodger?
- That's fine with me. - OK.
We'll take that as a yes on both fronts.
Yes, give it a shot.
MATT: All right, let's do it, guys.
I'm going to do what I got to do to save your house now.
Oh, wait a minute.
I seen something.
Here's some of the jewelry on the floor
underneath the papers, guys.
I don't know how it got there, but it's there
and walked on and stepped on.
She keeps bending over, picking things up.
There's jewelry on the floor that was stepped on.
All kinds of stuff like that's stepped on.
She's just all over the place, totally distracted.
Oh, boy, we got lots of goodies here.
She's slowing up the process.
What she's not grasping is we have
lost countless valuable hours.
Look at how far we have to go, Gerri.
And at the pace we're going, that's
why we've been trying to explain that we're
kind of behind the eight ball right now.
Yeah.
OK?
So now you know why we're pushing you is because we
want to get some success.
OK, another antique.
We're really only about 8 feet into the house.
There's just so much more to do.
Tomorrow, I'm just going to have to push
her and get her to the point where
she has to make the decision.
Either I let Matt do everything, or I lose the house.
GERRI: This was clean when I left here last night.
No, it wasn't. Come on.
You're good.
All right.
- Hi, I'm Eric. - Good to meet you, man.
Thanks for coming.
All right, let's check it out.
All right.
Let's do it.
Good.
MATT: And I'm going to walk him through the area
that we cleaned first.
I want to make the biggest impact that I can.
I want him to see, hey, man, we really have taken 20,000
pounds out of this property.
And this was all wood and stuff stacked under tarps.
ERIC: A very narrow pathway that one can barely walk down.
Yeah, I think it was here, was where the pathway was.
Sure.
MATT: So we're cleared all the way to the fence now.
And it is so much more than what it was.
MATT: Let's head in there, and we'll check out the kitchen.
It's a lot more paper than I remembered.
MATT: I know Eric sees the work we've done.
But you get rid of the trash, and now
you see the damage that the trash has done to the property.
ERIC: All the rat feces that you've
uncovered in here floors me.
Just to put it in perspective, this is a very big rat.
Yes, I mean, none of this was actually apparent when
I was through the first time.
It is actually worse now.
Did we pass anything code-wise?
Unsanitary conditions-- still unsanitary.
Restoring the means of egress--
although we can get to the back door,
the front door is still an issue.
Still have an incredible amount of combustible waste.
Clearly uninhabitable by humans.
I wouldn't want an animal living here.
Exactly. I wouldn't want my pet in here.
Right.
This is horrible.
It's now time for me to sit with the family
and let them know what their options are.
The bad news is, every single thing on the code, we failed.
What?
The entire inside of the house is full.
This situation is incredibly tragic.
We're going to provide aftercare for this family.
They can go together, and they can go separately
to work on their own hoarding behaviors
and what's contributing to it.
My hopes for my mom and dad are that we can get them
into a good place where they can live a normal life
and don't have to worry about any inspector issues
and pretty much take it from there.
Staying at this house should not be an option.
You guys need to be out of here, period.
This family needs to strategically stop,
pivot, and do something new.
The plan of trying to out-clean and get ahead
of the city, that will never work here.
I'm sorry for you, but I do want you in a better place.
And this is not a better place.
GERRI: I want to continue cleaning it out.
I still have to live here.
It's my house.
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