SALLY: I haven’t seen the floor in four years.
COMM: Compulsive hoarding…
TEE: Can you see the poop on the top over there?
COMM: Is a growing hidden problem.
TEE: This is definitely a biohazard clean.
COMM: It’s estimated to affect 6% of Americans.
TEE: There’s bottles of urine in here.
COMM: And up to three million people in the UK.
TEE: She’s got no use of her bathroom.
COMM: But when things get this serious…
SALLY: It got to stage where I just wanted
to end my life ‘cause I’ve had enough.
COMM: The experts need to take action.
TEE: It’s not good. It’s not good at all,
and this woman really needs our help.
COMM: Behind the ordinary looking exterior
of this flat in Birmingham, lies a potentially life-threatening secret.
SALLY: There is a lot of people who have such
a terrible time to just get rid of a piece of paper. I’m not that sort of a hoarder,
my hoarding is more of like, so much stressed out by my anxiety, my depression, that I’ve
ended up having a lot of stuff that, you know, I just think, 'Well, I need to get rid of it ', but
I never do, because my mentality cannot just cope with it, but yes, I do class myself as
one. A lot of people deny it, but I don’t.
COMM: But Sally, hasn’t always been a hoarder.
SALLY: I mean, I’ve been in the flat 15
years. Things do get untidy but, you know, I used to vacuum, clean, you know, and I looked
after six cats at the time. It’s actually started middle of 2010. My my cat passed away
all of a sudden, had a heart attack. I was reeling from him and the depression and anxiety.
Then I started going out with someone, was having problems with him, and then another
cat passed away, you know, had cancer, and then my mum had a stroke. And, it’s just
sort of like snowballed from there. And it would just build up and build up and then
it gets to a stage where, you know, you can’t cope anymore.
COMM: Sally’s hoarding has become so bad
that she’s been threatened with eviction.
SALLY: The council got involved. They’d
had notifications of people saying they could smell something. But then the council suggested,
would I consider someone coming in? Felt scary, depressing, and it’s frightening, my anxiety
went through the roof, but it needed to be done because obviously I was going to lose my flat.
COMM: Thankfully, she has found someone to
help - specialist cleaning firm N Gervais.
CAZ: We offer domestic cleaning service and
through that we’ve had people contacting us to do what they call their house clearances.
But then what we were finding were people like Sally, that needed somebody to come in
and help de-clutter the house. So, that’s how it started and then we found that as we
went along, it became more extreme. TEE: What I am about to do is get to the back
of the living room in order to open the door to let the fresh air in. It’s going to be
a mission but it’s got to be done, because there is no air here.
TEE: When I come in, it’s the smell, it’s
the piles and piles of black bags, which I believe is rubbish.
TEE: So, outside is pretty messy but…
TEE: But that is the least of our problems
at the moment. There is an overspill here of her bits and bobs, which has basically
just got to go.
TEE: Another problem that we’ve got here
is the fact that she can’t get into her kitchen. The door can neither open, nor close,
because of the amount of things that’s in front of it.
TEE: This is Sally’s toilet and bathroom.
I don’t think you can see the cobwebs up there. I think she has got used of her toilet
now. But she’s definitely not got use of her bathroom. Her cats are in there, I don’t
want to let them out.
TEE: Everybody deserves to be able to use
their bathroom. Okay, can you see the poop, on the top over there? That’s all cat faeces.
So it’s pretty bad in here. This is definitely a biohazard clean. It’s not good at all.
And this woman really needs our help.
CAZ: The majority of us have some form of
care background, whether it’d be mental health, learning difficulties or working for the NHS.
TEE: I’m a hoarding specialist and that’s
great, because I have got OCD myself, but on the other end. So, it’s really fulfilling
to me to clean someone’s house and get it back how it should be. To me that’s great.
SALLY: That’s all cat food in there.
TEE: I know it’s the cat food, but…wait… you’ve got cat food everywhere though, haven’t you?
SALLY: The whole of this problem of the process
is basically all of it. You’ve got strangers coming in, you know, going through your stuff,
it’s dirty, messy, you know, you are embarrassed of what you have done for those people to deal with it.
CAZ: It’s a mental health condition, we take the time…
TEE: To get to know them.
CAZ: To get to them and their things. It’s not a house clearance, and we try to respect that.
SALLY: I mean, I need to be here to see you
know what they are getting rid off and they’ll be asking me questions. And that was my biggest
anxiety, no way could I have had that happen.
TEE: So I have given Sally a job. I’ve made
her start making cardboard boxes of things that she wants to keep.
TEE: Ok, what you are going to do for me is
go through your bags and throw away any rubbish, any packaging you don’t need and any boxes
you don’t need. Right, so can you do that for me? Right, good, okay.
SALLY: I just feel very disgusted with myself.
I had no help and I was being pulled and pushed from everybody. You know, and it got to a
stage where I just wanted to end my life because I’d had enough, you know, I couldn’t cope
anymore. So that’s why, you know, I need to have it sorted and that’s what we are
doing now.
COMM: Since her cat Mikey died in her bed
8 weeks ago, Sally has been sleeping in the hallway.
SALLY: I just couldn’t face going to bed
anymore. So I basically got a round chair, which I’ll put there. And as you can see,
it’s been rubbing. I have a fire heater to keep me warm. I have a footstool and I put
my feet up, and I sleep in the chair with a blanket over me. And I’ve been doing that
for the last two months. So, it’s much, the strange thing is, it’s much more comfier
than my bed. Because obviously with everything cluttered on my bed, I used to have just about,
I don’t know, 2 foot, if that, of sleeping space and then the cats would be by me as
well, so it was very uncomfortable. And also I suffer with carpet bugs, they actually would
be crawling over the bed, and you’d have them crawling over your legs, so it was not
very nice. That’s what happens when you are a hoarder. You have to find somewhere
to sleep because there is nowhere else to sleep.
COMM: Meanwhile, Tee has made an alarming discovery.
TEE: This is four years worth of kitty litter.
Instead of emptying it, she has got more fresh kitty litter and then put it on top. It started
from here, don’t know if you can see this bit here, and it came up like a mountain and
ended here. And that’s how it’s been all the way around. So, we’ve obviously dug
through and we’ve got to this section now. So, hopefully this is the last bit of kitty
litter until we get back into the living room. Because they are digging up the kitty litter
and it’s dust basically, we don’t want the dust to come, you know, come up and we
are inhaling it. So, the best thing we do is spray it down. So instead of using water,
we are using chlorine instead.
COMM: Perhaps even more alarming, it’s not
just animal waste lying among the rubbish.
TEE: Right! Stop! Stop! These bottles here,
I don’t want you to step on, because apparently these are the bottles that she was weeing
in. She was ill a few years ago, she started to wee in the bottles. She’s told us that
the bottles are in this room.
SALLY: I suffer with bladder problems, stress
urinary incontinence. I couldn’t even get to the toilet in time, so I started having
accidents obviously. It got to a stage where I was using, filling up bottles of urine more
than I was getting rid of them.
TEE: We are nowhere near the floor at the
moment, you think we are, but we’re not. There is a mountain of kitty litter here,
mixed with urine and kitty poop, and we’ve got to shovel through this. I don’t know
how long this has been here, but I’d say four years.
TEE: My prime concern is that she gets her
home back unable to use everywhere correctly. I think it will take about two weeks to clean
the whole flat, it’s all about the manpower really.
COMM: And Sally is looking forward to the transformation.
SALLY: My sister and my brother-in-law come
up and do them a dinner and things like that, so I’m…and have my mum back round again.
That’s the sort of things I am looking forward to. Be able to socialise with my family more
than anything else. So, yes, that’s what I’m happy about.
COMM: It’s six months since the clean began,
but has Sally avoided falling back into her old ways?
COMM: Since the clean, Tee and Caz have been
checking regularly on Sally’s welfare.
TEE: Sally has been amazing. She’s stayed
positive throughout, she is always happy, always smiling, even when she thinks, ‘Oh
my god! We’re not going to get it finished,’ we do.
SALLY: When you first came, obviously, you couldn’t actually get into the kitchen,
all you could actually do was just get the gap of the door, so, it’s a big difference
now, because rubbish was piled up to here, everywhere was completely full of rubbish.
TEE: It’s totally different now.
CAZ: And the thing is you’ve maintained it, which is great, because a lot of people
after a couple of months… SALLY: Yeah!
CAZ: They start to go back to their old ways. SALLY: Especially with what I’ve been just
going through as well.
TEE: With what’s happened with her mum,
the passing of her mum and everything, I don’t know how she’s done it, but she has really
pulled through.
SALLY: My life’s improved dramatically,
I feel a lot healthier, a lot happier, even though I still suffer with depression and
anxiety. Passing of my mum has only been recently. Because of the state of how I’m living now,
I can handle it more and it got to a stage where, if my mum had passed away and I was
still living in the same situation, well, I don’t think I would be here now, to be honest.
SALLY: Feels strange, but, you know, because
you get used to it after four and a half, five years of it. But now it’s all clear,
you still come around the corner, you still, I still have a shock to be honest, thinking,
‘Wow! It’s gone, it’s all gone.’
CAZ: I was so proud of her, was so proud of
what she’s achieved. We shall be visiting Sally for the next 12-18 months, but I reckon
18 months at least, so that, she has got that support…
TEE: And aftercare. CAZ: And aftercare, it’s like visiting an
old friend so, it’s quite enjoyable.
SALLY: There’s millions of people out there
living like I was, you know, and if they could see me and say, ‘She's done it.’ Then
maybe they can do it themselves. But they have to have the right mindset at end of the
day. And because the girls helped me to come back to my old self, I mean they’re not
just cleaning service, I see them as family. I love them to bits, I really do.