A MAN who never cleaned his flat was found living in squalor – with his shower smeared in poo and toilet brimming over – after his neighbours phoned the council to complain about the smell.
The resident, who lives alone in a block of flats in Dudley,West Midlands, left cleaning agents horrified when they arrived to check on him and saw the state of his house.
His shocking living situation is shown in a new documentary, Grime and Punishment, which airs tonight on Channel 5. The programme reveals that seven in 10 Brits claim they’re too busy to clean.
“This young lad lives on his own and keeps himself to himself,” explains Tony, the caretaker of the block of flats.
“But a lot of people complain about the smell and stuff like that which is not good. Yesterday we had to inspect his room, we had no choice.
“But when we went in I was devastated. The living conditions that he’s got are unacceptable.”
In stomach-churning footage, Tony gives the camera a tour of the one-bed property, starting with the bathroom.
The camera shows it covered in old sewage from a blocked toilet that has overflown.
It appeared the resident had made no attempt to clean any surfaces – and had even left a block of soap lying on the floor.
“As you can see, it’s really bad. Nothing’s been cleaned. Nothing at all,” Tony squirms.
“Toilet’s blocked and absolutely filthy. Sewage, faeces. Horrible. I feel like I’m going to hurl. It’s really bad. It’s rank.”
The horrified caretaker calls in ‘grime buster’ Don who specialised in extreme cleaning and has a very useful advantage in his line of work.
“I lost my sense of smell in a diving accident many years ago. I just never got it back,” he explained.
“It’s great because you can’t smell anything.”
We see Don get to work extracting 120 litres of “raw sewage”, using a vacuum cleaner-style machine to suck the smelly liquid into a bucket.
“Bread, toilet roll, veg. All sorts in there, and general waste itself. Horrible,” the cleaner reveals as he cleans up the mess.
Next, he had to “scrape out the faecal sludge by hand” to leave the bathroom transformed.
The kitchen was also tackled in the same way, with the surfaces scraped back to their original state.
“It’s not very nice but when you’ve done it as many times as we’ve done it, you can quite happily go home and have your dinner without thinking about it,” Don explained.
Elsewhere in the documentary, we see a young couple running a pub be told off by an environmental inspector for their poor hygiene in the restaurant kitchen.
He discovered mouldy bread behind the fridges, rat droppings among rubbish close to food storage and no-one wearing aprons in the kitchen.
It’s enough to put you off your dinner…
