Apologize for the poor writing in advance, but my goodness this is a long blog entry.

I used to work for a company that did building restoration and renovation. The company is based in an historic and extremely affluent city. We worked mostly on historic homes, some as old as 225 yrs. (That's another exciting blog entry). We also did renovation on newer homes, and sometimes built custom homes, ground up.
One of the company's carpenters, I'll call him X, used to work for a real jerk, I'll call Y. Y promised X's mother to do some much needed work on her house. Y took X's mother's $10,000 (be way of contractors, folks) and took off without doing any work. Rumor has it he drank away the money and now lives with his disgustingly wealthy sister in England (track him down, girls). At any rate, X asked the owner of the company if the company could fix the job on his mother's house.
Owner of company sent two foremen to look at the house. The verdict? House should be condemned. Not safe for humans. X said that his mother would not be able to handle it. Could we just fix it? Mind you, the men hadn't even gone inside yet..
blah blah blah...job gets done. I am one of the 3 first people sent to work on house - 2 carpenters apprentices and one engineer foreman.
The first few days we worked solely outside - siding rotted, big holes. We suspected that animals lived inside the walls. We take away siding, we poke at the walls. Our awls slipped right through the rotting wood. We scratched our heads. What the heck was holding up this house!!?? We saw cracks in foundation wall - house was sliding down the hill. The back deck had fallen completely off the house and was lying on the grass. We walked around the back of house - the back sliding glass doors were shattered, glass was just lying between screen and storm door. Large vines had actually grown from outside, through the cracks around the door, and into the house. We also saw a window with several dead plants in it. I mean, been dead and dried up for years. All that time, big, black trash bags had been appearing in multiples outside of her front door. Each morning, we'd have to haul them down to the end of the driveway so that we could get to where we should have been working. We had been using power tools this whole time and had been using the neighbor's electricity. X's mother kept making excuses as to why we could not go into her house.
Finally, time came when we had to get into her house to replace windows, etc. Foreman talked to X. X admitted that he had not been inside his mother's house for 10 years, nor has anyone else. Foreman says, we must get in.
So...we finally get in. There was a horrific, oppressive smell. Something had literally died in there. Milk jugs with the previous year's date on them were lined up on the floor by the door - with milk still in them. The milk had separated into a cloudy white liquid floating on top of a murky grey liquid. Pizza boxes were piled up 5' high. There were old doughnut boxes, broken dishes, papers, cardboard boxes, videos, photos, books, magazines, you name it, covering every surface. This woman had created a small pathway from the front door to the stairs. part of the ceiling had fallen into the first floor and was resting on top of a book shelf. Vines crawled down the inside of the living room walls. Since there was so much junk everywhere, the outlets were covered up, so she had strewn extension chords all over the place. Upstairs was worse. We tried to open a door and there was so much junk, the door would only open about 6 ". No matter how many details I recount, I will never be able to properly describe the horror that was this house.
One of the carpenters brought onto the job later was standing on the scaffolding outside the 2nd story window. He crawled through the window, put his hand onto the floor/piles of paper and something moved underneath him. He hollered, quickly retracted his hand and refused to go back in again. When I was working outside, I saw a raccoon run from inside the walls of the house up into a tree. We had apparently disturbed his slumber. He very clearly had been living inside this woman's house. Which would account for the horrible dirty animal urine smell.
The most amazing part of this is that this woman drove a shiney new mercedes and every morning left the house looking impeccable. She kept a prestigious job at a well known and well respected private school.
Crazy, I tell ya.