Cleaning a hoarder’s apartment comes with challenges. Make sure you protect yourself while you help them work towards recovery.
If you’re cleaning a hoarder’s apartment, you have to consider different things than if you were cleaning a full sized house. The compact space requires a slightly different approach.
You’ve heard the stories: hoarders who get so overwhelmed with their stuff that they never clean, and their homes become so unsanitary that you can’t even walk in them. Many people don’t know where to start when they discover their loved one has been hoarding.
You have a lot to think about before you try to help a hoarder clean. Would it be safe? Is it worth taking on the health risks involved?
Let’s talk about hoarding and how to clean up a hoarder’s apartment safely.
You’ll learn how to identify the signs of a hoarding disorder, plus tips for working with professional hoarder house cleaning services.
What Is Hoarding?
Hoarding is an impulse control disorder, which means it’s a behavior that is out of your control.
It’s a mental health issue that causes you to have an extreme amount of distress when getting rid of things.
Hoarding disorder makes it difficult to organize things in such a way that they don’t interfere with daily life.
A hoarder might be able to explain why they keep so many things, but they still can’t get rid of them—and this causes trouble for family members, property managers, and even neighbors.
It’s not just collecting random items like magazines or newspapers.
Hoarding can involve any kind of object (even trash) from clothing to food items—even expired food, or items that are broken, unusable, and rotting.
Should You Clean a Hoarder’s Apartment?
The first step is to determine whether or not you should clean a hoarder’s apartment.
The answer is yes, unless you’re not a professional. If you’re not a professional, then don’t do it yourself.
Find someone who’s been trained and certified in hoarding cleanup and has had experience with the process before. Otherwise: You may get hurt!
Since hoarding is a mental health issue, it’s not as simple as just throwing stuff away. If you try to force them to clean up, you could make the situation worse.
The home may be dangerous to enter. It could be suffering from mold, pest infestations, unsanitary conditions, or severe structural damage that may put your health (and life) at risk.
Getting professional helps you protect everyone’s safety.
Protecting Yourself When Cleaning
When cleaning a hoarder’s apartment, it’s important to keep your wellbeing in mind.
Wear protective clothing and gear that won’t be damaged by the filth you’ll encounter.
You should also bring along gloves, a mask, goggles and hard hat if possible.
Steel-toed boots are also recommended in addition to any other safety gear.
Because of the extreme squalor that hoarders live in, tripping and falling hazards are just the tip of the iceberg.
If you do take a tumble, you risk injuries, lacerations, and infections.
These safety risks are already a big concern when cleaning a hoarder’s home. But in an apartment, things get trickier.
From navigating tight corners, to carrying things up and down long flights of stairs, the risks (and exhaustion) only become greater.
How to Find a Professional Hoarder House Cleaning Service
In order to avoid a lot of stress and anxiety, it’s important that you find a reputable company. You want a company with good customer service as well as excellent results!
At Home Clean Home, we believe in doing much more than just taking out the trash. Our team comes prepared with a solution for anything.
Whether you’re struggling with a pest infestation, need to repair some drywall, or don’t know the best way to get rid of all that stuff, we can help.
We do whatever it takes to transform your home and get your loved one back on track to leading a healthier life.
With nearly 30 years of experience, there’s nothing we haven’t seen.
No decisions are ever made without your express permission.
Our services are safe, discreet, and available 24/7
The most important thing to remember if you are cleaning for a hoarder is that it’s not about cleaning or organizing their things. It’s about helping them find peace.
We work closely with everyone involved to develop a personalized plan that takes your physical and mental health into account.
Speak to one of our experts today for a free assessment: 718 627 5781
How to help your loved ones who have hoarding disorder?
When you have a loved one who is struggling with a hoarding disorder, it can be hard to know what to do to fix things. You might feel strongly about throwing it all away, but that is not the right approach. Getting their involvement in the decision-making for every item is crucial.
Staging an aggressive intervention will just make this worse.
It could trigger an even more extreme hoarding episode and do more harm than good. You never want to make your loved ones feel like they are under attack.
Convincing them to work together with you may take time, but it is the only way to nurture effective long-lasting results.
Recovering from hoarding takes consistent treatment – not just one day of cleaning up.
Involving your loved ones in every step of the process will help them develop better decision-making skills for future situations. If you barge in and try to take control, it can make them feel like you don’t care about their opinion.
They may feel angry, upset, or even ashamed. Sending them to therapy or throwing things away isn’t enough. You need consistent action and a compassionate attitude.
Why use a professional hoarding cleanup service?
When you work with a professional, you prepare yourself with a great support system. A trained and experienced hoarding cleaning expert will know exactly what to do to get you on track.
The right service can help you clean up the home much more quickly than by yourself. It can also help put your loved one on the path to long-term recovery.
Hoarders911 has been serving the community in NYC and beyond for almost 30 years.
We develop personalized plans for every person that we help, and we never make any decisions about their belongings without their express permission.
Our team will help you create a strategy for the future while helping you transform the home.
There is nothing we haven’t seen. No matter what the situation, we have a solution.
Call us today for a free consultation: 718 627 5781
