Let’s buy a run down crackhouse

This place is next door to my shop. Those of you who have been by or know me well enough have heard the stories and seen the clips of the previous owners and her “performances” we’ve been getting for 4 years. Well her kids finally moved her down with them, and we snatched the place up for cheap. The plan is to completely level the property, re fence 80% of it in with our current yard, and leave a very small piece out near the road to eventually build a barndo duplex or something to rent out. Here are some pics:






She had hoarded herself out of the house and was living in a tent in the driveway. Pretty sad situation

At this point we have just piled up all the trash, hauled a little bit of scrap and the vehicles, and loaded one 30 yard open top to haul. That single open top is maybe 1/10 of what’s in the yard and cost a whole bunch of money, so tomorrow I’m picking up a 15 yard dump trailer that this will pay for. We’re less than 3 miles from the dump, so between myself and my guys we can probably make 4-6 loads in a day.





The family found over $6k cash stashed in the house. I had no intentions of going through it but now I’m thinking we will empty it out and see if there’s more. I won’t post the stuff we’ve found in there so far but you can text me for them, didn’t have water or electricity for over a year but she sure was keeping the love shack in business.

Can of gas and match, wait til it’s raining.

Wow, looks like a tornado hit it.

Call the fire department and see if they want to do a training burn on it.

Wow! It's amazingly sad how some people live their life. Good on ya for cleaning it up.

Glad you got it

We did that with an old farm house in east Texas. Had to disconnect all utilities first. Not just have them turned off, had to physically disconnect them.

your life wil be even better soon.

It's like an episode of hoarders, I hate it so bad but am completely mesmerized that people live like that. I can't hardly stand one thing on the counter that doesn't belong.

Congrats on getting a handle on the situation. Will look so much better once leveled and fenced.

looks like you could have an estate sale, come and get it for cheap to those in the area. might save you a few minutes on the clean up. I see a couple of pickup tool boxes that might help pay for some of your troubles.

refer over to the other thread regarding how to sell something.... put up an ad on FB market place to come pick & choose, you load, low ball offers accepted

Roll off dumpsters are in your future?

I have zero interest in dealing with fb marketplace people



I filled up a 30 yard in 7 minutes. Going to pick up a 15 yard dump trailer today and I’ll have one of my guys hauling loads to the dump several times a day when we can spare him.

Wow, buddy! You got your work cut out....but I am thoroughly happy that you got the place and it can take shape over time. Very curious what you've found! But almost scared to see what you found! LOL

My thoughts exactly. Looks like a tornado except the house is still standing.

We went through 4 20 yard dumpsters on a typical 1150sf house renovation, and we didn’t have the junk yard that you do. Good luck. You’ll need that dump trailer and it will quickly pay for itself. I would’ve went that route, but I was 55 miles from the dump.

Burning it and then cleaning up the remains would be a lot faster.

I'd accidentally throw a cigarette out near a gas can that just happened to be sitting on top of that pile of junk and wait a couple of hours before I called the fire department.

I can related, we hauled off over 80k pounds of scrap metal from my FIL place, mostly all hand loaded, several trips to the dump and several large burn piles along with 2-3 20 yard roll offs that was all out around his shop/barn. Took us several weekends and many trips to the scrap metal place with only having access to my 20' GN pipe top with plywood sides installed. It's not a fun task ... but the temperatures are better now than come the summer!

there was a lot of stuff that we could have taken the time to sell but just needed to get it done pretty quickly.

It rhymes with bilbo, lots and lots of bilbos. Also a few nutt bugs

Was she a bread maker- Dill dough?

Picked up the trailer a bit ago, we won’t have a skid steer back here until next week and then we’ll start making runs.

Do yourself a favor and smash out all windows and removes all doors to prevent squatters

Once we get done rummaging through it we will smash in all the entrances

Dude!! Would be cool to see photos of him loading them in a dump trailer with all the other trash, joy kill bruh!


Great pickup sir, lot next to your place is almost unheard of, or overpriced, great score.

If you responded to 9-1-1 calls, you would be appalled at how some people live.

With an open front door, you can be ten feet outside the house, and smell the stank from inside the house.

We've been in homes so filthy, we believed that even taking them all the way down to foundation, and no sheet rock on the walls, you'd still never get the stank out.

I wouldn't move a muscle without the skid steer and grapple on location.

One of my attempts to get out of the O&G business I was a Telecoms man, doing residential and commercial Phone/Internet/Cable stuff. I was good at what I did but despised certain neighborhoods. Had a 3 service install at a residence that I smelled when I approached the front door. Nice old lady answered and went through the process of telling me everything that she wanted and where she wanted phone & cable jacks. We stepped over I don't know how many rotten litter boxes as she had 30-40 cats. I'm not a puss but that smell was way too much. I refused to do the install. It was that bad and I can handle some [censored]. I called my boss and he started in on me, I cut him off and said bring your [censored] over here.....he did, along with his boss....they both looked me in the eye and said let's get the hell out of here before somebody gets sick. Trash/[censored]/food waste piled up with cat [censored] & piss everywhere......no Sir.

Seen it.
Smelt it.

There's a street in our district that is notorious. We got a call, and the Captain yelled "GUARANTEED GROSS!"

Once you have it leveled, a couple thousand pound of quick lime where the house set might get rid of the smell.
Glad you got to purchase it and remove that element from near your place. Well done.

Finally got my security camera reliably connected over there. Got a dude locked up last week and ran some more off. Today I was able to run a trailer load to the dump and then load it up again for my guys to take tmw while I’m out of town.

skid steer makes work a lot easier and quicker ... still a lot of work

It's just time and diesel.

The Skid Steer is the Swiss Army Knife of machinery.

I'll never be without one.

Got some extended family that live like hoarders. Always been disgusted/ashamed of how they live. After I’ve been in and around random residences over the years for work I’ve discovered it’s not nearly as abnormal as I thought it would be.

It’s truly a mental issue. I’d say 8 of 10 homes/apartments I respond to calls for are hoarders or extremely unkept.

Many years ago, I was a fireman and later a cop in a small town. I remember several of those in rural areas.

We are the polar opposite of hoarders. Look at the amount of stuff I sell here cheap, give away for free and also set out in the alley for the old man that cruises the alley on Sunday afternoons taking things people leave out for him. If I know I'll never use it, it's not gathering dust very long.

Old people keep everything. My grandparents kept underwear to use as rags.

In Red River County, drive from Bogota towards Cut Hand, then on to the river. If you don't like the looks of a place just be patient, a meth head cooking will set it on fire before too long and it'll be gone. One time a few years ago when I hunted out there, I counted 6 recently burned out places within a few miles of each other.

On the extremely rare occasion that I watch a reality Cop show, and they go inside someone's house, I'm always sorry I did. Not to mention the laborious effort it takes to get witness details about what they saw when they're so high they could hunt ducks with a rake.

And some are "sleepers".

Super nice neighborhood. Everyone's houses and yards are extremely well kept. Set foot in certain ones, and the inside is the polar opposite of the outside. Hoarder house with dead rodents and too many pets inside.

2 more loads this afternoon. Total weight out of the front yard so far is below

If I am reading this correctly you capitalized on a mentally challenged person’s family?

I have so many comebacks to that Shane I don’t even know which one to pick. I’ll just go with the default ‘bless your heart’

Crack head gone, now your hauling off the rats hang out.

Back in 2006 my friend's dad died in a comercial unit off Goodnight Lane in Dallas. He had been evicted by the city from his house 3 weeks earlier after a 10-year legal battle. He was a hoarder. The unit he died in was so packed ratted that the fire department and County refused to remove his body and I had to do it with help from an older DPD sergeant. It was probably 130° in the building and he had been in there dead for several days. He was soup that I had to scrape off the floor with a shovel to get into a mortuary bag. If I think about it hard enough I can still smell him. It took my friend and I nearly 5 weeks of working in the middle of the night to clear the place out. His father was a German immigrant that still had ties to the country and his death and the conditions surrounding it made national news in Germany for some odd reason. For several years after that I used to help hoarding support groups clear out horded houses. Towards the end of the sickness it gets so bad that they are saving their own crap and urine in jars and buckets.

https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/this-gross-house-6398023

Recently I replaced a customer's pool equipment and while doing so had to turn off the gas briefly. This is in the Disney Streets neighborhood around the intersection of Royal Lane and Midway and they are not cheap houses. This is a wealthy older woman's house who works for Morgan Stanley and probably makes a million and a half dollars a year. I had to go inside to relight the water heaters for her. She was the last person on the planet I expected to be a hoarder but there wasn't a horizontal surface in the house that wasn't piled high and I've seen less cats at the city pound. She owns several homes in that neighborhood that no one lives in and if I had to guess she simply uses them as storage.

I got tired of throwing away dirt so I drew this dude up. We have been modifying frac tanks so we have a ton of 3/8” plate drops, they covered all of the materials so all I had to buy was the quick attach plate. The sides bolt on/off

I like that...!!!

Awesome rock bucket. Need one of them for my tractor.

Nice work Ramball

End of day yesterday we were at about 23 tons removed. Going to make 2 today and then move around back to smooth out the old dirt bike track

Great work Sir!

Slicked it off!

Now ya just need a match and a calm day

That’s actually impressive.

Did you find anything they had you couldn't live without and kept for yourself?

Had to take a couple weeks off to get some stuff knocked out in the shop, but we’ve got the trees all down as of yesterday. Getting the house somewhat emptied out now so that we can knock it down

Did you contact the Fire Department?

We've used houses like this to do lots of training on. Searches, force entry, ventilation (which will put holes in the roof) and even live fire training. Build a fire, let it grow, put out the fire, repeat. Until the end of the day, and let it burn down.

So it’s actually in the county, the street is the city limit. I am waiting to hear back from the vfd that is first responding to the house to see about exchanging a donation for them to burn what they can. If not, then I’ll be contacting another vfd that responds and they will do it. Don’t know about the actual house though, I was just hoping they could burn the wood that’s out back from all the decks and fencing etc.

I forgot to take a before pic, but they had a dirt bike track in the back of the lot that we got flattened out last week. They had piled up all kinds of rocks and cinder blocks underneath those jumps, the rock bucket did great sifting through it as we spread it.

Garvey I spoke with the department, they’re going to let me control burn the wood piles but won’t touch the house. Too close to other houses and worried about a tceq complaint on the smoke.

All of the trees are down, today I will get over there and start emptying the last bedroom I’m supposed to go through. After that I’m opening it up to a couple of scavengers who want some of the useless [censored] she left.

Before you let the scavengers in I would go through the house and look for "repairs" in the sheetrock if it has any. If it has wood floors take a good look at them to see if any have been removed and reset. When my Granddad passed we notices some little things and after doing the above we found a pretty good chuck of money in the walls and under some boards. Make sure to check the closet area good as this is where we found quite a bit. Also check between the backing on pictures hanging on the walls.

We’ve found about $1500 in cash I mailed them, and the family found over $6k when they went to move her out and when I let them back in to go through things one last time a few weeks ago. It has all been in pockets of pants or in tube socks all tied up. Best I can tell she wasn’t very good at hiding it, but we have looked in some walls that looked tampered with and in the attic with no luck. I’m just over it at this point