We lasted thirty-six hours.
Sunday, early afternoon
I didn’t expect the house to still have furniture. Mitch’s aunts, Kristy and Mary, had not made that clear when they told Mitch and I the house was ok to move into. It made for some interesting talk about where to put everything from the truck. We tucked away the boxes and the remaining furniture into a corner of the living room. I kept quiet about how incredibly dirty the downstairs was. There was clutter everywhere. The house had a musty, not-lived-in-for-a-long-time smell throughout. We put Millie, our cat, in one bedroom upstairs.
There were papers, boxes, books, clothes, knickknacks, and bags filled with stuff on every table and chair. Piles of paper and clothes filled the room. The piles of stuff formed a pathway leading to the kitchen. I had to watch where I walked because of the extension cords running across the pathway, disappearing into knee-high piles of clutter. I couldn't tell if anything was connected to the extension cords. I didn’t see any space heaters or fans unless they were hiding under something.
One table looked like it was about to fall over from the weight of things piled on its surface. Boxes of moldy paper, envelopes crammed with more paper, books with cracked spines, all piled on top of each other. There were layers of dust and old cobwebs everywhere I looked. Every flat surface had something on it. This is a hoarder house, I thought.
The kitchen needed cleaning up before cooking would even be possible. The one bathroom wasn’t in much better shape. We would need to clean out the tub, sink, and toilet before taking showers.
Time had come to a standstill in the house when Mitch’s grandmother, Vivian, went to the nursing home three years ago.
I had seen nothing like this. I had heard of hoarder houses but had never been inside one. Looking over at Mitch’s father, Bob, I said, “I thought Kristy and Mary drove in from time to time to check up on the house.”
Bob admitted his sisters didn’t enjoy driving into Chicago because they insisted the crime was too bad. They only looked in on the house twice since Vivian entered the nursing home.
This made me wonder how often Vivian’s grown children visited her. Why didn’t they sell the house? I looked at Mitch for an answer. He shook his head. He would explain later.
Sunday evening
Mitch’s parents followed us to U-Haul so we could return the van. They treated us to dinner and grocery shopping. Dropping us off at the house, they said they’d check in on us the next day.
It had been a long day, and we were beat. We decided to tackle the serious cleaning the following morning. We had all the time in the world to make this house our home. I suggested that we at least put the groceries away and try to tidy up the kitchen and bathroom. The rest of the cleaning could wait.
As I unpacked the groceries and started planning on where things would be in the kitchen, I noticed the little brown bits of…. mice turds. The smell was overwhelming. Every cabinet, along the counter, baseboards, were mice turds. I almost expected to find a live (or worse, dead) mouse when I opened a new cabinet door.
Pointing out all the mice droppings to Mitch, I suggested letting the cat loose downstairs. She loved chasing toys and if they moved on their own, all the better. Mitch suggested keeping everything perishable in the fridge for now. Nonperishable food was left in plastic store bags in the cabinets.
With the groceries put away, I looked around to see what else I could clean up. I saw a large, ornate urn in one corner. At one time it would have been pretty, years of it sitting in the corner had it covered in layers of dust and the bottom covered in what looked like a few inches of mice droppings. I was debating if it was worth cleaning up when Mitch walked in holding a box of silverware.
“This was in a corner. I doubt any of them are usable. Looks like it could be genuine silver, so it’ll need polishing.”
I looked in the box and shook my head. The silver looked beyond help. The more we cleaned, the more frustrated I became as I tried to understand how the house had gotten into the condition it was in. I was wondering how long Mitch’s grandmother had lived here alone. How could her own children let her live like this? How could they only check in on her a few times? Did they not care? Or did they choose to be this ignorant?
Early Monday morning, 1 am
It was getting late. Millie was in one bedroom, fixed up with her cat bed and litter box. She had found a scrap of clothing to play with. “New things to sniff! I hear things in the walls! I found a scrap of material to play with! Thank you!”
Mitch and I flopped onto the bed, making plans for cleaning the next day. It was well past 2 am before we fell asleep.
Shortly before dawn, a few hours later,
Noises woke me up two hours later. Chitters and scraping noises—animal-like sounds. They were coming from inside the house. I poked Mitch awake. “Do you hear that? Where’s it coming from? That’s too loud to be mice.”
“Sounds like squirrels. Let’s go see.”
Upstairs held three bedrooms and a small room that was more like a huge walk-in closet. The animal noises were coming from there. Turning on the light, we saw a gaping hole in the ceiling and what looked like squirrels darting onto the roof. Millie was sitting on the floor with rapt attention, making the chittering noises that cats make when they see a bird or some other small animal.
Mitch aimed a flashlight into the hole. “We’ll need to have the roof repaired, but there’s not much we can do about it right now. Let’s go back to sleep and finish cleaning up tomorrow.”
Monday, mid-morning
We woke up a few hours later and went downstairs for coffee and breakfast. I opened the cabinet where I had stashed coffee and let out a yelp. There were mice turds everywhere and a few boxes of food had been chewed open. I cleaned it out last night. Opening the other cabinets, I saw mice droppings in every cabinet, and there was a fresh layer on the counter and on the baseboards. It looked like the mice were hosting grand parties every night. Was there a dead mouse or food somewhere? The smell was stronger than the night before.
Hollering at Mitch, I said, “Dear, this is beyond gross. We need traps.”
Mitch looked over the kitchen and sighed. “Everything goes in the fridge. Millie can have the run of the house for now. She loves chasing anything that moves.”
After a quick breakfast, we cleaned up the bathroom, enough to make it useable. I thought I smelled a faint sewer odor from the toilet and made a mental note to ask Mitch about it later.
With the bathroom and kitchen in a somewhat respectable state of clean, we gathered up trash bags and gloves to clean up the downstairs hallway. Just past the front door, there was another pathway made of boxes and bags that stretched from the stairs and extended to the back of the house. I sat on the stairs, going through various bits and pieces of paper and other items. There was clutter everywhere.
Piles of papers, clothes, boxes, and bags were crammed on top of each other. To the right of the front door was another pile of boxes and bags. As I moved the boxes around, I noticed that everything sitting on a bench and there was a small table next to it was overflowing with junk. The bench and table were in horrible condition.
I looked at Mitch. “Didn’t your grandmother throw anything away? When did your grandfather pass? Was she living alone like this since then? And how could her own kids just let her live like this? I mean, your parents live a couple of miles away. What the hell is up with that?”
Mitch liked everything to have a place. He was a neat freak, and I was a self-admitted neat slob. If I could find things when I needed them, it never mattered where said item ended up. We had had a few fights about it when Mitch moved in with me two years ago. But this was more than just messy. This was hoarding. I understood why Mitch was so OCD about where everything should go.
“My parents, sister, and I lived here for a while when I was younger, before my grandfather passed. The house wasn’t in this sort of condition, but it was messy. I know there were some mental health issues, but I have no clue why they didn't address them. Part of it might have been ignorance. My aunts and my dad have always been this way. I’ve blocked it out, as my sister has. I guess after my grandfather died, my grandmother went a tad mental.”
“A tad? Dear, we’ve been filling up trash bags for an hour and, based on what I’ve seen, I’m guessing we have hours more just in this front hallway. There’s still the rest downstairs. The entire upstairs. We haven’t looked in the basement. Did you notice the smell of the sewer from the toilet? I’m going outside for a cigarette.”
Mitch joined me on the porch. “Wanna take a break and explore the neighborhood? We can grab lunch from the hot dog place on the corner.” He gave me a wink. “And you need to learn how to eat a proper Chicago hot dog.”
“Oh, shut up. I’ll put ketchup on whatever I want. But yeah, a walk sounds like a great idea.”
After munching on hot dogs and fries, we let Millie loose downstairs and started cleaning the upstairs hallway. The plan was to work their way through the house, at least getting the trash out. Armed with a roll of trash bags, gloves, sponges and cleaning supplies, I was hoping we could make better headway. I thought I was better prepared for what we might find.
While the room we had chosen to be our bedroom, and the room we had set Millie up in were clean (if they could be called that, compared to the rest of the house); the front bedroom and hallway were another matter.
Upstairs in the hallway was another pathway created by piles of boxes and bags leading to the front bedroom. In a corner, two dressers were overflowing with clothes, papers, boxes, and pictures. The dresser drawers were hanging open, unable to be closed. I reached into one drawer and pulled out a handful of old, moldy baseball cards. Mitch thought they may have been his father's childhood. Another reach into a drawer produced a coin collection, now dirty and disorganized. Clothes, pictures, and paper were scattered in and around both dressers. Mitch found envelopes crammed with canceled checks, bank statements, and income tax returns. Another open drawer held boxes and envelopes of family pictures, all moldy and ruined.
Like the hallway, the front bedroom was full of more clothes, boxes, bags, loose papers, and books. It was hard to open the door all the way because the room was so crammed with things.
As with previous rooms, a small path led from the doorway to the bed. More extension cords ran across the pathway, but I couldn't see what they could have been connected to. There were no space heaters or fans in sight. The room was chillier than the rest of the house because the front window was open a few inches. When I tried to close it, I noticed the window was jammed open. It had ruined everything within a few feet. The room overlooked the street. Why had no one tried to break in?
I sat on the bed, unsure of what might happen or if critters would come out of some hidden hole. “This is overwhelming. I can’t wrap my head around how bad this is. Your aunts lied to us, and how could your parents not see this?” I was feeling angry and frustrated.
Mitch sat down next to me. “If it helps, I didn’t think it was this bad either. I’m pissed at my aunts, who insisted the house was livable. I’m thinking it might not be. And yes, I noticed the smell from the bathroom. I think it’s time we started in the basement and worked our way up. Let’s grab a flashlight, more trash bags, and gloves.”
Millie came running up the stairs with a half-dead mouse in her mouth. She dropped it in the bedroom doorway with a look of pride in her eyes.
I didn’t know what to expect as Mitch opened the door to the basement stairs and we started going down. The musty, non-lived-in smell was stronger. The sewer odor made the air almost unbreathable. Mitch turned on the lights, and we stood at the foot of the stairs and looked around to get our bearings in the dim light.
The basement stretched the length of the house, but the overhead lights stopped before the other end of the room. In the shadows of a corner of the room, a table was covered in rusty tools. Someone bolted the back door to the yard shut.
A refrigerator stood in another corner, with a chain and padlock wrapped around it.
“I don’t even want to know,” I said.
“We were always told never to open the fridge,” Mitch said. “My sister and I used to make up many wild stories about what was in there. The most common one was the dead body story.”
Along with the back door being bolted shut, one windowpane in the door had a hole, and weeds grew from outside. A pile of moldy boxes sat next to the back door. The boxes looked like they would disintegrate if touched.
The basement was like the upstairs—piles of boxes, some opened and some closed, and trash scattered all over the floor.
Mitch aimed the flashlight on the ceiling and said it was pure asbestos. “I think it was on a very long list of things my grandfather meant to fix, then I suspect he didn’t care.”
On one wall was a table filled with books, pictures, toys and moldy stuffed animals, and various other things from his father’s and aunts’ childhoods. Time had ruined most of them.
It was getting harder to ignore the sewer smell as we walked around. I saw a pipe coming down from the ceiling that ended a couple of inches from the floor. Another pipe rose from the floor but didn’t connect with the pipe from above. I had a horrible, sinking feeling. “Isn’t that where the bathroom is?”
“This pipe goes to the toilet,” Mitch said. “There’s the pipe in the ground, but—” Mitch trailed off. It was too obvious what he was going to say. Every time someone flushed the toilet, the gap between the two pipes could spew the water and waste all over the basement floor.
I made a face. “That’s beyond unsanitary. Let me guess, it’s been like that for years? Was it like this when you lived here?”
Mitch admitted that it probably was.
“I need a smoke,” I said. “What are we doing for dinner? I have no desire to even try to cook anything.”
Monday evening
Mitch offered to get hot dogs or burgers from the hot dog stand on the corner. “We can go over the first floor after we eat. There’s still the living room to look over, and we haven’t heard a peep from the cat in a while.”
Almost as if on cue, Millie was waiting in the hallway with another half-dead mouse before running off to see what else she could find. “All these toys that move on their own! I like this place!”
“Well, at least one of us is having fun,” Mitch said.
Our boxes and furniture made the already crowded living room even more cramped. Moving things around, I found two space heaters and three box fans. They were plugged into one of the many extension cords that seemed to run off to some forgotten outlet. I had to wonder how the house hadn’t gone up in flames.
By unspoken agreement, we started picking up everything and tossing it into trash bags. There was no point in stopping to go through everything anymore. It seemed the more trash bags we filled up, the more trash and junk there was to throw away.
As we were taking the latest haul to the alley, I asked what was in the garage. Mitch struggled to open the door all the way because the garage was filled to the brim with more bags, boxes, a few bikes, three lawn mowers, and tools. As with the house, there was a pathway from the door to the yard to the garage door that opened to the alleyway. We agreed the garage would be the last thing to clean.
Mitch admitted he had to use the bathroom, but didn’t want to use the only bathroom in the house. “We can walk over to the grocery store,” he said. “There are public restrooms there.”
“We can’t go to a public rest room every time we have to pee,” I said. “I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t think we can do this. This is not what we signed up for. They lied to us. I was close to tears at this point and beyond frustrated and mad.
As we made our way upstairs, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. On the stairway landing to the second floor, there were vines from outside growing on the corner landing. The house's external wall had a three-inch crack running up the corner of the landing. It took me a full minute to realize the exterior wall was coming apart from the house.
We picked up burgers and fries after walking to the grocery store to use the bathroom and ate in silence on the front porch. Behind the screen door, Millie waited for another mouse. I wondered how many she had caught and had left out for us to find later.
“So, what now?” I spoke up. “Are you thinking what I am? We can’t live here. Your aunts and parents didn’t know how bad it was? Or did they know but didn’t care? I’m trying to wrap my brain around this. We left New Orleans on a promise that we’d have a place to live. But we can’t. We just can’t. I can’t.” I was on the verge of tears.
Mitch was silent for a minute. He squeezed my hand. “I know. I wish we had a camera to take pictures of everything we have found. We’ll grab paper and pen, start at the basement, work through the house, making a list. I don’t know what else to do.” He sounded as defeated and angry as I did.
Early Tuesday morning, 1 am
Hours later, with a list two pages long, found us in a booth at a nearby 24-hour diner. The food we had ordered sat untouched. We paid the bill and walked back to the house to get a few hours of sleep.
Tuesday morning, 8 am
Mitch called his parents. “We can’t live here. The house is unfit and dangerous for human habitation. Can we stay with you until we find an apartment? We can leave what we don’t need here until we find something.”
Mitch’s parents arrived, and they helped us load the car with a few boxes, our clothes and Millie’s litter box and carrier. Millie sat in the cat carrier and howled. We stood in the doorway for a bit, defeated, angry and wondering what we would do next. Our dream of starting fresh with a place to live rent free had been taken away from us.
No one cared about a one-hundred-year-old house that had been allowed to fall apart. No one cared about an old woman left to her own devices in the house and now in a nursing home. No one cared enough to bother to make sure that the house was livable.
We had been lied to. We were told the house was fine. We left our jobs and our lives over nine hundred miles away on a lie. I wanted to love this house. I wanted to make it our home.
My heart broke as we drove away.
The house that nobody loved would once again be empty.