When you’re dealing with a hoarder property in Hawthorne, California, you’re probably looking for as much support as you can get when it comes to having it cleaned. You may have thought you could shoulder the responsibility yourself with a little elbow grease and good intentions. The fact remains that cleaning a hoarding property is one of the most difficult cleaning jobs that a person could ever face. Hoarding properties have many difficult layers that have to be gotten through. Working with a hoarder house cleaning company could make all the difference in the world.

What Is Hoarding?

Hoarding is a mental illness where a person feels compelled to save every single item they find and bring it into their homes. These items could be as benign as a piece of furniture or as bizarre as a bag of garbage. There is no rhyme or reason to the choices. The hoarder simply knows that they want to keep what they find. After a while, their homes become cluttered. Shortly after that, their homes are suddenly from floor to ceiling with junk. After a while, this collection of trash and tchotchkes becomes an unsanitary mess. 

As hoarding gets worse, personal grooming habits become non-existent. Bathing becomes an afterthought, and washing dishes because of something that they used to do, either because they’re no longer interested in keeping clean or because their bathtub is filled with junk. It becomes difficult to walk in the house because walkways and pathways are filled top to bottom with garbage and trash. Hoarders often need to find new places to sleep because their beds are covered with all of their collected items. 

Why Are Hoarder Houses Health Risks?

Hoarder houses are health risks for several reasons.

One of the biggest dangers of being in a hoarder house is the fact that it’s filled with biohazardous waste. Biohazardous waste is any type of waste that’s filled with pathogens, the microorganisms that cause disease in humans. Biohazardous waste is found throughout a hoarder house in the form of blood, human waste, animal waste, bodily fluids, garbage, standing water, and a host of other infected items throughout the site.

Another key reason that hoarder houses are a danger is because of the amount of items that are in thes homes. Hoarders often fill their homes from floor to ceiling with piles of junk, creating fire hazards and spawning situations where entire rooms are at the risk of collapse at any moment. This means that if a novice or an inexperienced person tries to go in and clean the home, they could get seriously hurt due to exposure to biohazardous waste, or they could get hurt by having something fall on top of them. Experienced cleaning crews know exactly how to navigate their way safely around hoarder houses.

How Do Hoarder House Cleaning Crews Protect Themselves?

When professional cleaning crews prepare to clean hoarder houses, they suit up with PPE gear that will help form a barrier between them and the biohazardous waste they’ll encounter it. They wear body suits that cover them from top to bottom. They wear face shields, masks, and respirators that protect their noses, eyes, and mouths. They wear puncture-resistant gloves that help protect their hands while handling sharp items that may be hidden within the chaos inside of the home. They’re also experienced making their way through precariously balanced stacks of items. They work together to make sure that everyone stays safe.

How Does Hoarding Different From Someone Who Lives With Clutter?

Sometimes people get confused because they might confuse clutter with collecting, or they’ll think having a massive collection is the same thing as hoarding. The thing that sets hoarding apart from everything else is that with a hoarder, there’s no rhyme or reason as to what they’re bringing into the home. They collect such a random selection of items that the rooms in the home are no longer able to fulfill their original purposes because they’ve become messy storage rooms. 

Clutter simply exists when someone has a disorganized way of managing their belongings. Clutter only turns into hoarding when the clutter becomes excessive and the person is no longer able to let anything go. The most challenging level of hoarding disorder is squalor. That’s the point when sanitary issues no longer matter to the hoarder, and those are the homes that are filled with biohazardous waste.

How Long Does Hoarder Property Cleanup Take?

The amount of time that hoarder property cleanup takes depends on the size of the job. It will depend on the level of hoarding, and it will depend on how much biohazardous waste has affected the home. One good thing is that teams like ours are used to dealing with these sites and can go through them with speed, efficiency, and professionalism.

Give us a call if you have any questions about getting a hoarder house cleaned. We can help.