One of my sisters, I sure is probably a DUmmy, typical in that she knows everything and spends hours every day on her facebook writing all this hate mail on Trump. 20 years ago she lived in a townhouse in a gated community and totally trashed the place.
With the help of some of my other brothers and sisters but mostly me we cleaned up her place after an intervention which also included youth services. I spent 8 months cleaning the place and my estimate is I threw out 29 tons of trash. In addition I filled 11 of those huge contractor bags with trash just from her car, I filled a chevy astro van to capacity 4 times with magazines.
Even to this day my brother and his wife have to monitor her finances as she has no concept of how money works and yet she knows everything. She has a degree in drama but has no talent, has to have a maid over once a week and actually got herself fired for a federal civil service job, something we all thought was impossible.
It's all mental illness. Imagine living in the apartment next to Star Member Tom Yossarian Joad (18,124 posts).
ON EDIT: Several things I learned from the experience and one of those is I will never clean up a family members place who is a hoarder without being paid. It is a terrible job and it scars your mind. A place that was as bad as my sisters I would call the local zoning office and health department. Her place was so bad they would have condemned it.
With fire and EMS I have been in other hoarders places. There is a smell common in this situation, it lingers even in your car and stays in your head for weeks. A fire in this kind of place we don't do interior suppression only rescue and protect the exposures. Too much fireload and not enough room to move around. I was in a trailer fire a few months ago the place was infested with cockroaches.
