grossest apartment dweller moves out

May 20, 2004 3:00 PM

Grossest neighbor moves out. "About a year ago we noticed a foul smell coming through the walls of our bedroom from the apartment next door..."
posted by tsarfan (43 comments total)

Um yeah, that's a lovely pictorial of squalor. It would have been interesting to get a picture of the guy who lived there.

The place actually looks like some crack den or abandoned building squat pad.

Nasty and makes me realize that my own strained relations with our neighbors could be much, much worse.

Shame some of the pics are so dark though.
posted by fenriq at 3:11 PM on May 20, 2004

My brother had to clean up a place with a dog room once. Imagine how that felt.
posted by jon_kill at 3:14 PM on May 20, 2004

Reminds me of "The Fan Man".
posted by interrobang at 3:17 PM on May 20, 2004

Ew. Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew! Gasp! EW!
posted by Lynsey at 3:17 PM on May 20, 2004

Must have been a Grateful Dead fan.
posted by keswick at 3:18 PM on May 20, 2004

I don't even want to think about what's living/growing/reproducing under that layer of filth in his bedroom.

I mean, damn.
posted by FormlessOne at 3:18 PM on May 20, 2004

Ewww. And I thought my fridge was kind of gross when I moved out of my apartment. Mine was immaculate in comparison!
posted by SisterHavana at 3:24 PM on May 20, 2004

Aw, c'mon. A little paint, some curtains, maybe a little CLEANSING FIRE, and the place could be a regular love-nest.
posted by elwoodwiles at 3:28 PM on May 20, 2004

I wonder if he was a musician...
posted by tonebarge at 3:40 PM on May 20, 2004

or a member of greenpeace.
posted by angry modem at 3:51 PM on May 20, 2004

That's only about 1½ times worse than what my room was like at its worst. (Those shots are actually from one of the best times, and the last two are "after" shots from when I cleaned it a few weeks later. It's even better now, the grotesquely stained rug replaced with laminate fake-wood)
posted by abcde at 4:03 PM on May 20, 2004

Reminds me of this post
posted by konolia at 4:03 PM on May 20, 2004

I am once again reminded that my housekeeping skills aren't nearly as bad as I think they are. I was just kicking myself mentally earlier that I'd spilled some soda in the fridge, but didn't have time to clean it up right away and then forgot about it. A few drops of soda on a glass shelf is NOTHING compared to the fridge in those photos. How the hell does one get their fridge to look that way?!?!
posted by Orb at 4:06 PM on May 20, 2004

Before anybody makes wisecrakes, despite the fact that there is a vaseline intensive care bottle on top of the computer, I swear to God it's not for mastubation ;) not that I never do, but still.
posted by abcde at 4:09 PM on May 20, 2004

I live in an old house that's been remodled into a quadplex. The woman who lives on the third floor has been there since 1980, and if her van parked out front is any indication, her apartment may look something like the one pictured in this post. People are free to live how they want, but I worry about her apartment being a fire hazard to the rest of us.
posted by arielmeadow at 4:10 PM on May 20, 2004

I'm going to print out that picture of the fridge and stick it up on my door. It makes mine look pristine.
posted by smackfu at 4:22 PM on May 20, 2004

If this was a rental, are regular inspections by the landlord not an integral part of the renting world in (I assume) the US?
posted by dg at 4:32 PM on May 20, 2004

a) do the neighbors know what pot smells like? Because the mud in the fridge & the bathroom make me wonder if he was growing something, and they talk about a "foul smell" emanating from the place. And pot's not called skunkweed for nothing.

b) I seriously doubt he lived in the bedroom underneath all the papers etc. That looks like "pack the stuff to keep, toss the stuff to throw away into the bedroom..." to me.
posted by mdn at 4:33 PM on May 20, 2004

Everyone's making fun of this, but what about the poor man who lived there?
posted by Nelson at 4:33 PM on May 20, 2004

This post will haunt me like a repressed childhood trauma.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 4:43 PM on May 20, 2004

I saw a Jaguar that looked like that (on the inside) the other day. It was sad. It's a CAR, not a dumpster.
posted by tomplus2 at 4:53 PM on May 20, 2004

Nelson, poor people can't clean up after themselves? Or just poor Deadheads can't clean up after themselves?

If he was an invalid then maybe but there's no mention of any handicap, just stink.
posted by fenriq at 4:53 PM on May 20, 2004

abcde> Before anybody makes wisecrakes, despite the fact that there is a vaseline intensive care bottle on top of the computer, I swear to God it's not for mastubation ;) not that I never do, but still.

Riiiiight. Sure. No really. We believe you.
posted by snarfodox at 5:09 PM on May 20, 2004

I'm going to print out that picture of the fridge and stick it up on my door. It makes mine look pristine.

Excellent idea, smackfu. Then when my husband points out the three drops of soda a a bread crumb on one shelf (which he alreday has - clean freak that he is), I can show him what a REAL biohazard looks like. :D
posted by Orb at 5:17 PM on May 20, 2004

Nelson, poor people can't clean up after themselves?

I meant poor as in sad, not poor as in impecunious. Something must be wrong with a person to live like that. Maybe crippling depression, or infirmity, or..
posted by Nelson at 5:24 PM on May 20, 2004

Couldn't have been a Republican. Too many living things left intact.
posted by Mo Nickels at 5:26 PM on May 20, 2004

That guy is an amateur. There's no visible insect larva, there's no dead animals inside the fridge or out, you can't see the wall studs anywhere and there's no visible graffiti.

If he was a pro there would be skateboard wheel marks on the ceiling, a bowling ball embedded in the last square yard of intact drywall and some sort of prosimian dwarf-hominid thing living in the salad crisper that just evolved there, demanding beer or Easy Cheeze or something.
posted by loquacious at 5:29 PM on May 20, 2004

My friend doesn't really clean up his bathroom. It's kind of gross, but hey, I've seen worse. Anyways, one day, I go to spit or something into his sink (don't remember), and greeting me from the drain from between trimmed beard hairs is a small green sprout of some sort.

Seems another friend was cleaning his pot and threw the seeds in the sink.
posted by angry modem at 5:51 PM on May 20, 2004

Reminds me of the house that my parents bought about 14 years ago when we first moved to Virginia. We picked up this steal of a house that had been abandoned for 6 to nine months. Turned out that the occupants had just left behind almost everything they owned, including about 8 cats and a fridge full of food. Since the power had been out for months, all of the food in the fridge had been rotting in it for months and the cats had been using the house as a huge bathroom. We had to rip out all the carpet in house, and the smell still lingered for months afterward. They left behind clothes, family photos, all kinds of things that made it look like they left in a real hurry.
Oh yah, to top it all off, the guy painted autos and had done up all of the aluminium siding with spray cans of primer. And they had buried an 4ft above ground pool halfway in the ground, and removed it before they left, leaving a 30 ft hole in the back yard.
It was just the fixer upper my parents were looking for in a small town where to raise me and my brother. My father has and still continues to put a lot of time and money into the house, although the siding finally came down this year.
I will never forget the mess that became our house.
posted by daHIFI at 6:29 PM on May 20, 2004

It would have been interesting to get a picture of the guy who lived there.

How in the world would that have been interesting? The apartment does make an impression, but I'm not sure how pointing and laughing at him can be considered anything but cruel.

Nelson, poor people can't clean up after themselves?

Do you even know he was poor? Rich people can't be nasty? Besides, we know nothing about this man. He could have been old, alone, and had psychological problems. When it comes to senior citizens, many fall through the cracks. Many simply are not capable of living on their own but have no one to look after them.

This almost sounds like a case of hoarding.
posted by justgary at 8:49 PM on May 20, 2004

I'm sorry but that kind of dirt is the kid of thing you need to be proactive about. The guy had to be up to something.
posted by Space Coyote at 11:16 PM on May 20, 2004

It's just a 3 inch wall away from our own bathroom.

This is where I lose sympathy for the writer.
posted by drezdn at 11:17 PM on May 20, 2004

I lost sympathy back at the beginning when they made no effort beyond knocking on the guy's door to find out what was going on with him. A landlord that gave a crap about his property would have had a locksmith in there to ensure he still had right of access to the place to keep tabs on it, and neighbours that are able to do anything but take photos to publish on the internet and go, "Ew, what is that!? Ew, gross, ew!" may have prevented this from happening.

If someone is capable of making a mess like that, it would seem to me that they're in need of some serious help.
posted by tracicle at 11:51 PM on May 20, 2004

I was raised in a neurotically clean house, but have myself always been a slob. But also kind of an extremist with OCD tendencies. So, anyway, my pattern my whole life has been to let things get so messy it's intolerable, and then do an anal-retentive top-to-bottom reorganize-and-clean flurry. This wasn't ideal, but it did work for me. And when I got stuff clean, I got it really clean. Though a slob, because of my childhood, I'm also paradoxically an "a place for everything and everything in its place" sort of person.

Anyway. So nowadays because of my bone disease, my arthritis is very bad and I'm not very ambulatory. The floor might as well be the ceiling for how accessible it is to me. And the problem is that I haven't learned to change my habits. I'm still a slob. Except now, I can't clean like I used to. I'll try, but after doing a little bit I'll hurt so bad and be so tired I'll have to stop. And then I can't get out of bed for a couple of days. I can't ask someone else to clean this mess, because it's such a mess, you know?

And I still haven't adjusted to this. My house and particularly my bedroom is an intolerable mess, and I hate it.

So, anyway, looking at those photos scares me, makes me hope I don't ever get that far gone. And, obviously, I worry about the man that lived there.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 11:56 PM on May 20, 2004

abcde: I too got upset when I had wires everywhere.
posted by ed\26h at 1:27 AM on May 21, 2004

This is what your house looks like when you spend too much time on the internet.
posted by ciderwoman at 3:12 AM on May 21, 2004

Judging by the floor plan that I can see, this looks like it's probably in an apartment complex - the kitchen in particular is exactly like the one that I had several years ago, right down to the model of the stove and the color of the fridge. Thankfully, my place was never even close to being that bad, even with 5 cats.
posted by chickygrrl at 7:54 AM on May 21, 2004

It's funny how one's own standard of cleanliness is usually the litmus test for cleanliness in general. My guests often make comparisons between my place and their own places, and almost everyone in this thread has compared their own places to this man's.

It's just a 3 inch wall away from our own bathroom.

This is where I lose sympathy for the writer.

Why? Yes, it would have been great if this man had gotten some help, but there are some people who won't be helped - perhaps he was one. And these people are quite right to be concerned about the proximity of such filth to their own place.
posted by orange swan at 8:30 AM on May 21, 2004

Why?

The only two problems that the filth would cause for the neighbors would possibly be smell and maybe insects.

The comment strikes me as an "oooh get it off"- ie. an emotional reaction- rather than a reasoned response.
posted by drezdn at 8:43 AM on May 21, 2004

The only two problems that the filth would cause for the neighbors would possibly be smell and maybe insects.

Well, those are fairly significant problems, don't you think?

If the guy needed help them maybe someone should have made a significant attempt to help him. But frankly, why should anyone have to put up with this sort of thing? You pay your rent money, doesn't that entitle you to an apartment that doesn't smell nauseating because of what a neighbor might be up to? And isn't it the landlord's responsibility to rectify the situation?

Me, I'm in the guy's situation, I'm on the horn with the landlord daily to complain, and if the landlord doesn't solve the problem, I'm out of there - and good luck renting the apartment.
posted by kgasmart at 8:56 AM on May 21, 2004

justgary, my response was a response to Nelson posting about sympathy for the poor guy. I took it as a sleight against poor people and wrote back.

And no, my interest in seeing what he looked like was how he cared for himself. I've know people that live in squalor yet you wouldn't know it by meeting them on the street. Curiousity not cruelty but thanks for checking.
posted by fenriq at 11:12 AM on May 21, 2004

abcde: I too got upset when I had wires everywhere.
sheesh thought both of you would post a real mess, that's just clutter which makes you look unorganized:)
posted by thomcatspike at 2:26 PM on May 21, 2004

Tracicle, if you read the FAQ you'll see that a) they were not his landlords and b) they kept pestering the landlords and management about him and suggesting social services until they found out he was moving to a care unit at a local VA hospital (although whether this was a result of their pestering is not clear to me.)
posted by Pigpen at 1:39 PM on May 22, 2004