Hoarding Cleanup – DIY Guide

Dealing with a hoarding situation is not an easy task for both the hoarder and anybody else involved. There are many reasons why a person decides to hoard items, all of which need to be taken into consideration.

This article is going to dive into detail about how you can clean up a hoarder’s home. It is not an easy task, both physically and mentally. But with perseverance and a lot of helping hands, cleaning up a hoarding situation can be done yourself.

Entering a Hoarder’s Home

The trick is to stay as calm and emotionless as possible

The first time entering the house that a hoarder is residing in can be a trying experience. There are typically a large amount of items in piles, rotting food, animals, etc. With that said, it is VERY important to stay cool and collected which will help everyone else keep calm. The hoarder is often extremely embarrassed, so acting emotionally will only make the situation worse.

Once you have entered the home, it is important to go through as much of the house as possible. This will allow you to look at the contents of the home and come up with a game plan to get the hoarder’s house cleaned out.

Cleaning out Hoarder’s House

This is the most difficult part of this process, but obviously the most important. While some people may think that removing items from a hoarder’s home is easy, it is anything but that. The amount of labor, man-hours, and dump fees required is often-times staggering.

We have found that approximately 4-7 people on a hoarding cleanup job is ideal. Assign 2 people per room, and work from the bottom-up so you can safely walk through the house as you go. Instead of bagging individual items, it is typically easier & more cost-effective to purchase heavy duty trash cans and shovel the items into the trash cans.

The average time it takes to clean out a hoarder’s home really depends on how long the person has been hoarding and the amount of items in the home. We have found that it takes the average homeowner & a crew approximately 1 week to complete, start to finish.

Disposing of items from a Hoarder’s House

The biggest time consuming variable is not cleaning out a hoarder’s house, but the way you will dispose of the debris & items. Typically, you will either haul the items to the landfill yourself or hire out a dumpster.

When hauling the items to the landfill by yourself, you will want to have a large enough truck such as a box truck to haul a decent amount of the debris. At the landfill, you will need to hand-unload the debris, which takes more time. This is the most effective option to dispose of the hoarded items but takes the longest.

A more popular hoarding cleanout option would be to hire out a dumpster from a dumpster rental company. You can typically pack more debris into a dumpster, and you don’t need to unload it yourself. A downside to dumpster rental is the dumpster rental companies sometimes run behind on schedule. This means you may be sitting with a full dumpster waiting for a new one for a few days.

Cost of Hoarding Cleanup

You may be asking at this point, how much does this all cost? The cost of a hoarding cleanout depends a lot on whether you have friends/family doing your labor or you hire employees. Another large variable is the dumping and hauling fees in your area.

The typical hoarding cleanout cost is broken down below. We assume that the hoarding situation has been going on for 10+ years, and an entire house is filled with items.

• 160 man-hours @ $20/man-hour = $3,200 labor
• 4, 40 yard dumpsters including overweight fees = $3,800 dump & hauling fees
• Miscellaneous material & PPE = $850
• Total average hoarding cleanout cost: $7,850

Hire a Hoarding Cleanout Service

As you can see, cleaning out a hoarder’s home is no easy undertaking. It costs a significant amount of time, labor, and disposal costs. An alternative option to cleaning out a hoarder’s house yourself is to hire a professional hoarding cleanout company to do it for you.

You may wonder how much a hoarding cleanout service costs, but we have found that we can do the work at often-times CHEAPER & FASTER than you can do it yourself.

How is this possible? Because A+ Enterprises Junk Removal is a full-service junk removal company, we specialize in this type of work. We have our own employees who are extremely experienced in hoarding cleanup. Our company owns 2 dumpster roll-off trucks and our own dumpsters, which allows us to work faster & more cost-effectively than dumpster rental companies.

With A+ Enterprises, there is no middleman required for your hoarding cleanout. We are the start-to-finish hoarding cleanup solution, and we handle every step of the process ourselves.

If you are interested in having our company clean out a hoarder’s home, simply fill out the contact box below or call us at 570-373-9996.

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