Mack Leighty from Midwest Magic Cleaning specializes in cleaning the homes of people with hoarding behaviors. In this episode of "Deep Cleaned," he tackles his largest project yet: a six-bedroom house, including a basement that hasn't been entered in three years. Barbara Fodor (Clean With Barbie) and Bonnie Ashdown (A Beautiful Mess) join him as they spend three days decluttering and sanitizing as much of the house as possible.
They cleaned the household with permission from the family and with knowledge of the individual. Though the cleaning makes the house safer and more liveable, experts recommend specialized cognitive behavioral therapy as the most effective treatment for hoarding disorder. If you or someone you know is struggling with hoarding behaviors, visit the International OCD Foundation's website to find help.
For more, visit: https://www.youtube.com/@MidwestMagicCleaning
https://www.youtube.com/@cleanwithbarbie
https://www.youtube.com/@ABeautifulMessExtremeCle-zl1wp
They cleaned the household with permission from the family and with knowledge of the individual. Though the cleaning makes the house safer and more liveable, experts recommend specialized cognitive behavioral therapy as the most effective treatment for hoarding disorder. If you or someone you know is struggling with hoarding behaviors, visit the International OCD Foundation's website to find help.
For more, visit: https://www.youtube.com/@MidwestMagicCleaning
https://www.youtube.com/@cleanwithbarbie
https://www.youtube.com/@ABeautifulMessExtremeCle-zl1wp
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 This is Mac. He specializes in cleaning the homes of people with hoarding disorder and is used to wading through,
00:07 heaping piles of clutter. But this job presents an unusually large challenge.
00:13 Mac will be cleaning a six-bedroom home in Illinois, and it's the biggest he's ever tackled.
00:19 This is just a nightmare. We're fighting food from 2013. We've got paint cans that I no longer have the strength to carry.
00:29 Mac often cleans solo and does much of this work free of charge, but this job is so daunting that he's invited two other cleaners to join him.
00:40 Over the next three days, they'll work together to declutter and clean as many rooms as possible.
00:47 Normally, I'm dealing with a totally different type of cleaning.
00:51 In other hoarder houses, I'm dealing with a lot of insects and mouse droppings and pet urine and just a lot of stuff that you definitely want to have PPE on in order to even enter the house.
01:03 This one was just piles upon piles of stuff. It's the most stuff that I've ever taken out of a house.
01:11 This house belongs to a family of four who declined to appear on camera due to privacy reasons.
01:20 One of the family members is believed to be living with hoarding disorder, although he's awaiting an official diagnosis.
01:27 But even with treatment, experts say relapses can occur.
01:31 This is the fourth time cleaners have worked extensively to declutter this home. The last attempt was five years ago.
01:38 Rooms in hoarder houses, we will often find rooms that have never been entered in a decade.
01:44 And one of the reasons that happens, and it's really common, is you have a room that no longer has a purpose.
01:52 So in this room, it's the living room, and the purpose is to watch TV and to relax.
01:57 If a room loses that purpose because they start piling things up, then the purpose of the room becomes, this is where we throw all of our stuff.
02:06 This place is not what I'd consider a hazard or a biohazard. It's a hazard for tripping.
02:13 And it's a hazard for fire, because they've got an open fireplace in here, and they've got so much clutter that it becomes a danger.
02:20 Hoarding is defined as persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value.
02:26 It's estimated that somewhere between 2 and 4% of the worldwide population have hoarding disorder.
02:32 It's only day one of this ambitious project, but when Mac and his team arrive at the house, they discover things already aren't going as planned.
02:42 So they have cleaned a bunch of stuff before we got here, which normally I wouldn't like.
02:48 I wanted the big mess, and I wanted to be able to go through the whole house and make it pretty myself.
02:54 This is, I think, a 30-yard dumpster. They've filled two of these already over the top, and we're getting ready to fill the third one.
03:02 If we had more time, we would probably fill 10 of these from this house.
03:07 So even though I'm a little disappointed, I'm really thankful that they did have the help.
03:12 Mac and his team plan to start on what's typically the hardest room to clean, the kitchen.
03:17 They'll need to pay special attention to this space to ensure it's sanitary enough for handling food.
03:23 Then they'll move on to the rooms on the main level of the house, and finally tackle the basement, which hasn't been entered in three years.
03:32 The key tools Mac and his team use are an emulsifier to cut through grease, a homemade all-purpose cleaner, scouring pads, and razor blade scrapers.
03:42 So when people are asking why this job takes so long, because we have to check everything, like if it's expired or not, or still good, no.
03:51 Okay, nope, a big no.
03:56 For the old pancakes.
03:58 Nope.
04:02 Beer, we never waste any beer, no.
04:05 Holy crap. That was a lot.
04:13 Yeah, that's pushing an easy 200 pounds.
04:25 Mac says the biggest challenge of cleaning a house like this is knowing what to keep and what to throw away.
04:32 There are a lot of people who will say you're fine to throw away absolutely everything, but they don't really mean that.
04:38 They mean you can throw away the junk, but you have to decipher what's junk and what's not.
04:43 There's also the urge to throw away large armfuls of stuff, and most of the time there's going to be some stuff underneath it that's important.
04:53 Alright, I got one counter done, I'm done. Back to the hotel.
04:58 Although cleaning the home will make it safer and more livable, it can be distressing for people with hoarding disorder to see their space transformed.
05:07 People who hoard tend to have a deep connection with their objects, and removing them can create an experience of loss, which is one of the major contributors of hoarding behaviors.
05:17 He's going to come home to a very, very dramatic change, and it's going to be a shock to him.
05:23 And even though most people will come home and see the change and think, "Oh my God, this is so great, you've cleaned my house," he's probably not going to feel that way.
05:31 As day one comes to a close, Mac and the team have finished most of the kitchen, which they will continue to clean for the next two days.
05:43 On day two, Barbie and Bonnie will also tackle the sunroom and living room, while Mac ventures into the basement.
05:50 I'm going to go down to that basement and do as much as I can on the basement today.
05:56 That is going to completely wear me out. If I can get that out of the way today, then that means tomorrow we can do things like the dining room and get this floor done.
06:08 [Music]
06:15 I'm going to attempt to tackle this area, this whole area. There's this part of the basement, there is a room to my left, and there's a room over here, and they all look like what's behind me.
06:28 This is going to be extremely difficult because there's a lot of things that need to be kept.
06:32 Mac discovers an abundance of stockpiled food and supplies, including countless jugs of water, jars of marinara sauce, bottles of hydrogen peroxide, and five-gallon containers filled with something unusual.
06:45 All these five-gallon buckets, those are all filled with food. Yeah, I thought they were paint.
06:51 What kind of?
06:52 Like that one says macaroni and spaghetti or something. So I'm just going to stack them all together, and they want to keep them.
06:58 But do you think it's still good?
07:00 Probably not.
07:01 People can inherit characteristics from their parents that make them more likely to develop hoarding behaviours. Grief and loss can also contribute to this.
07:10 Over the years, Mac has noticed patterns in the kinds of items he finds while cleaning.
07:15 They stack up air filters and medication and antibiotics and hydrogen peroxide and alcohol, and all of them are unopened, and all of them are there just in case, and they just keep building and building.
07:29 As Mac continues sorting through jugs of water and medical supplies, he stumbles on one item in particular he's learned to never throw away.
07:37 I've thrown away shells twice, and in both occasions people were like, "Have you seen a big bag of shells?"
07:42 That was when we went to Myrtle Beach or Florida or whatever on a family trip, but they're never displayed as a collection.
07:48 They're just stuffed in a bag in some random spot, but I've learned over time that shells are always a memento for somebody, unless they got their house infested by clams.
07:58 In which case, they're good to go.
08:00 Much of what Mac finds in the basement needs to be lugged upstairs to the dumpsters, and so many trips up and down the stairs with heavy bags is starting to take its toll.
08:10 Right now, my neck is just throbbing and my right arm I'm pretty sure is injured.
08:15 I have to be super careful today on what I lift and how I lift it and how much I lift.
08:21 It's a little scary because if I tweak my back anymore, I'm out of the picture, and I don't want that to happen.
08:29 Back upstairs, Barbie and Bonnie are finishing the kitchen and starting on the living room and the sunroom.
08:44 The owner used to sit out in the sunroom every morning and have scrambled eggs and toast and coffee and just, she likes to bead.
08:54 And I like knowing those details about the owner because it lets us know where emotionally this cleanup is going to affect them in a positive way.
09:03 As the crew begins to wrap up for the day, the wife of the person suspected to be living with hoarding disorder becomes emotional at the sight of the progress they've made.
09:12 She was on the second floor of the house looking over the banister and just seeing what Barbie had accomplished.
09:19 And she wasn't even fully done with the room. She broke down in tears just being able to see the floor again.
09:26 So if your partner has hoarding disorder, there is a resentment and a frustration and an anger that builds up.
09:34 And then finally, there's a release point where everything just comes out.
09:38 And that's what happened there. She's very happy to see it opened up.
09:43 She's been in the house for 13 years.
09:45 Today's work was way more exhausting than yesterday.
09:49 It's a different type of cleaning though because it's less, it takes less of your mind to do it, I guess.
09:54 I'm not really looking at having to sanitize and to get out tiny little stains.
09:59 I'm just looking to get things out of people's way.
10:02 And so it takes less mental effort, but man, it takes a lot more physical effort.
10:08 It's the final day of the crew's three-day cleanup.
10:11 And this is their last chance to organize and declutter as much of the main floor as possible.
10:17 This is the day where we have to be basically on our game and moving quickly.
10:22 We're wrapping up the kitchen. We have a dining room, which is just stuff that needs to be moved.
10:28 Despite the exhaustion Mac is experiencing, he returns to the basement and makes another discovery.
10:35 Oh, God. It's like old rotten garden seeds.
10:39 And they're not dangerous, but they smell really bad.
10:46 Garden seeds, when they go bad, smell like raw soot.
10:49 You have to breathe through your mouth when you're putting it in.
10:52 Otherwise, it'll make you nauseous.
10:55 You'll be able to see the story unfold as you go through layer after layer of old stuff.
11:01 The deeper you go into a hoard, that's where you start finding the really rotten stuff.
11:05 And so it always gets worse before it gets better.
11:09 Excessive acquisition occurs in the vast majority of cases.
11:13 Oftentimes, these items are on sale and therefore are bought in large amounts.
11:18 So instead of just getting one, they see the deal and they'll get 20.
11:23 But even in a big house like this, there's not room to put them all.
11:27 So you've got this giant pile of shop lights, and you're probably going to find that with everything from craft supplies to just random kind of stuff.
11:37 Night lights. There's an entire rack of night lights.
11:42 What's really frustrating about this is there's so much stuff that's necessary and has legitimate actual use.
11:49 That's actually really rare for a hoarder house.
11:54 At the end of day three, the crew has successfully cleaned the kitchen, sunroom, living room, dining room and basement.
12:01 And they've removed enough stuff to fill three 30-yard dumpsters to the brim.
12:07 We're almost done now.
12:09 Compared to other hoarder houses that's just me, with three of us working here, in order to get the entire house, every single room, top to bottom clean, we would have needed a crew of probably 10-plus people for at least two weeks.
12:25 After Mac and his team leave, the family will finish cleaning the remaining rooms.
12:30 They'll also hire help to maintain the home.
12:33 I like seeing a house that is so covered up with stuff that whenever you get all of it put away and where it goes and you get everything cleaned up, seeing the house as it was intended to be seen is really a cool thing to me.
12:47 And I think that's part of my brain that thinks of rooms like jigsaw puzzles.
12:52 But what keeps me doing it, I think, is more the stress relief that you see happen on the owner of the house.
12:59 You can see the stress come off of them at the very end whenever you leave.
13:03 This one was just exhausting in every measure just because of the sheer amount of stuff.
13:09 But it's worth it, especially whenever we get to look around the house and say, "Holy crap, we did that. We all did that."
13:15 [music]
13:44 [music]