Maintenance Workers Reveal 35 Things They Have Observed While Visiting People's Houses

People’s homes usually reveal a lot about their personalities. The colours, the layout, and the cleanliness are all indicators of certain qualities of the homeowner. There are countless small details about the state of a house that can tell visitors a great deal about a person. According to one online thread, home service workers have developed a particularly sharp ability to read these subtle signs. Recently, a question appeared on Reddit asking, “Professionals who enter people’s homes (plumbers, electricians, cleaners): What is something the condition of a house tells you about the owner that they don’t realise they are revealing?” Repair professionals responded with stories of the quiet clues they noticed while on the job—clues that were surprisingly revealing about the kind of person who owned the house.

#1

Image source: Kitetheplanet, andrewwkfan69 As an electrician it hurts to see how society sidelines older women for jobs and pay i see way more barely furnished house and units for single women than i do for men and i charge them way less as a result, is it good bussiness - no, but i have to sleep at night.

#2

Image source: CapableMaterial735, practicalsoup The ones with the cleanest homes always apologise about the ‘mess’, while those with the filthiest, smelliest, cluttered to the max homes never even hint at being embarrassed by their state of living.

#3

Image source: Ring-Dinger2, AsleepYellow3 When the house is spotless except for one chaotic room, it usually means the person is holding everything together on the outside but is overwhelmed on the inside. You can read people’s stress levels by the corners they stop caring about.

#4

Image source: jstanotherdaytrader, AnteKrist Used to sell floors and had to do in home appointments. I have seen some of the worst of the worst when it comes to messy. The one that did it for me was i went to an appointment for “Jessica”. I knock and an 8 year old boy opens with 2 malnourished dogs coming to sniff my shoes. I look around and there is trash and feces everywhere and the smell was unbearable. I ask the boy where is his mom Jessica. He says “my mom is in the mental hospital?” I said okay where is dad he says “i don’t know, he hasn’t been here in days” then the 8 year old boy goes to show me this gigantic hole in the floor. It was in fact the little kid who booked the appointment in his mom’s name. I told him “let me call my team to make sure i pick the right floor for this” stepped out, called my manager and told them about the situation and i immediately called the police for a welfare check. That was my last week as a in home flooring salesperson. I hope he is in better position now.

#5

When I was a medical student, we had to do home visits to patients who lived in the area assigned to our clinic. In Brazil we have a public health program called “Saúde da Família” (Family Health Program), where community health workers regularly visit every household in the neighborhood to check basic living conditions (clean water, sewage, sanitation), make sure patients are taking their medications, and understand why they might be missing routine medical appointments. As students, we had to accompany them to experience firsthand how our health system actually works. One day, we entered the house of a bedridden older man. The door was opened by a woman in her early twenties. We asked where he was, and she calmly said he had gone out. While the community health worker started looking around the house for him, I stayed talking to the young woman. The house was filthy. There were food containers and leftovers scattered everywhere, rats, and dirt. The smell was a mix of sour, rotten, and damp. The health worker eventually found the man chained in a dark back room, with no light, lying on a mattress completely soiled with feces and urine. Although he was bedridden, he was fully conscious. He told us she had locked him there because he had used more than two diapers in one day, and that he had been kept like that for at least ten days. We immediately called the police, social services, and an ambulance. I know he stayed in the hospital for around twenty days to treat all his ulcers, and the young woman was arrested. I can still remember the smell and the conditions he was living in. I have never forgotten that. Image source: GNering

#6

Housecleaner for 20 years. I live in a kind of quirky city where everyone decorates their house to their personality, and it makes me love them all! Even if I've never met them. Some have money to put into art/cool furniture, but many are just collecting decorations from friends and local makers, thrift and hand-me-down furniture, etc. People's mis-matched style gives you a view into their unique selves. Most everyone displays books and music collections that give you a view into their personalities as well. In contrast, I used to also run a division of the cleaning company in a wealthy military area, and the houses were usually professionally decorated or were big houses with mostly bare walls. I hate those houses! They are so dull, and I find their inhabitants unrelatable. They put a lot of money into their space, but no personality. Image source: custodienne

#7

Image source: The_guide_to_42, Plenty-Bridge-5129 Plumber here - Everything. If you just listen they tell you everything. You just look at a mess, and they will tell you exactly who what where when and how of it. 50% is lies because they can't face themselves, but their posture give that away. I used to judge. Now I just want to hug most people. Life is tough and they are doing what they can to survive. So many hoarders. There is a collective grief that is seems everyone is holding right now. A longing for being allowed to put the fakeness down and just been accepted for who they are, mess and all. To be real. Everyone puts this world up on social media and wont allow anyone to come over for fear of breaking that image. I've seen cold as ice spotless homes where working for days and you never hear the husband and wife talk to each other. Other times they try to drop all their worlds problems on you. Its not so much looking for conditions of their house to pick up clues. You just need to stop talking and listen and most people never stop revealing. Its like they were holding a breath just waiting.

#8

Image source: MadAdam88, streetvues I went into one house, a pretty nice house from outside, and there were boxes and boxes of stuff everywhere. My helper said to the homeowner, "Are you guys just moving in?" After a moment of silence the homeowner said, embarrassed, "We've been here 10 years." I told my helper later not to ask people questions like that.

#9

Image source: bananaapple12345, beets_or_turnips A big thing I noticed is the smell of houses, whether the owners keep windows open to air it out etc I've been in a lot of homes that the owners must have gone nose blind as the smell is so stagnant and stale, possibly even mouldy. I feel bad for the kids of these people cause there's been kids bedrooms that have never been aired out it seems.

#10

Image source: Palmervarian, PigsJillyJiggs I will never eat a work pot luck or someone else's food that I don't know very, very well. I can't tell you how many times I've gone into a million dollar home that's absolutely disgusting. Well dressed people with good jobs that have piles of dog excrements in the house or reek so strongly you want to cover your nose. Piles of disgusting dishes all over the kitchen, floors never swept. Its not just poor people in trailers, there are some really, filthy, dirty people of means. You're never sure who the gross ones are.

#11

Image source: Garybird1989, jinhitentertainment_ Lots of people here are talking about how gross people are. Some people are just quirky Went into someone’s house (mover) and everything was pink. Floor, walls, ceiling, furniture, their clothing, etc. Except their bedroom, that was lime green.

#12

Maybe not what you’re looking for, but I once worked in a house in winter who had the fire place going with the flue shut. The house was blanketed in smoke and they disconnected all the smoke alarms. When I showed them how to open the flue, they both lost their minds. Apparently they’d been living like that for years. I would love to be that oblivious. It seems easier. Image source: Striking_Yard_295

#13

First job out of college was knocking on doors for non-profits. One house I knocked on ready to do my speech and was met by an incredibly sad woman. She and her husband had lost three people in unrelated events over the past three weeks and she was heartbroken. I stuck around for a while and she ended up showing me her extensive collection of Vulcan and lord of the rings weapons, Shakespeare translated into Vulcan, giant figurines of lord of the rings characters and so forth. At another place I met a charming woman but there was an intense musky smell. Turned out much of the furniture had holes carved out for her ferrets to get in and out of drawers and such. Both super nice people. Image source: DendrobatesRex

#14

I enter people’s homes for work. This is not answering OP’s question. But don’t ever eat potluck food. NO POTLUCKS. Ever. Image source: BowsBeauxAndBeau

#15

Im an installer. Not necessarily a condition of the house, but it needs to be said. A lot of people don't watch their kids. The number of times a young kid will sneak into the room im in and start trying to play with my power tools, sharp metal, etc. The parents simply can't be bothered to watch over their own kids, even if it's for safety. Image source: nate_5859

#16

I used to paint home interiors. 40 years of being in other people's homes. One customer was the retired municipal court judge. His house was neat as a pin. Almost minimalist, and tasteful. He wanted to have his basement floor epoxied. I told him it would take 2 days, I'd move everything to one side of the basement and paint half, then the next day I'd move everything to the other side and paint the cleared side. He gave me kindof a funny look and said let's go down to the basement and you can measure. Cool. We go down there and besides the furnace the only other thing down there was a fold up ping pong table. The place was immaculate. You could eat off the concrete floor. I have never seen anything like it. That's almost 40 years ago and it still amazes me. My basement is full of stuff. Old furniture, Christmas decorations, tools, you name it, it's down there. We folded up the ping pong table and slid it into it's niche and everything was good to go. Nothing even to sweep. The judge ended up being a great client and a very sweet guy. He was very good to me over the years. Most organized man I ever knew. It turns out he went to Annapolis and was a naval officer in WWII. I wonder if that's where he got it, or if it just came naturally. Probably a little bit of both. Image source: jonthepain

#17

Image source: ReplacementLevel2574 Worst for me was a litter box on the kitchen counter.

#18

I’ve been in home remodeling for about 10 years now and in that time I’ve seen…. So much…. From a professional point of view: poorly maintained homes tell me I’m *going* to have a to upcharge for certain things because if the inside of the home looks this bad, god knows what’s going on under the hood. Also despite a dirty and neglected home, these people tend to be more likely to want the work done but they’re also unlikely to pass a credit check. Just seems to work out like this quite often. From a personal point of view: a home’s cleanliness and maintenance is often a reflection of the person(s) living there. People with clean and maintained homes tend to have this mirrored in their personality while very messy and neglected homes tend to be a mirror into the person(s) you’re speaking to. It’s honestly quite sad, cause when you’re inside someone’s home for 2-5 hours you’re inevitably going to have moments of getting to know one another and you’d be stunned how many of these folks treat you like a therapist cause they have *years* of being pent up with no one to speak to and you showing even the tiniest sliver of interest causes them to open the floodgates. Image source: Competitive_Ad_1800

#19

I work as a home energy auditor, when the first thing a homeowner says to me is " I'm not a hoarder." I know I'm in for a show the next 2 hours. Image source: baseball_rapid50

#20

Image source: Admirable_Holiday653, Patient_Plum_8860 My husband is a pest controller and the things he sees would literally make your hair curl. Beds alive with bed bugs and living like it for YEARS. People living with rats as part of their normal life.

#21

I'm an electrician in a smallish rural city in Texas. One thing I've always said is just because you are poor doesn't mean you have to be trashy. Image source: TwoCraZyEyes0

#22

I used to work for a high end audio video installer. We went out to do service work on some in ceiling speakers. When we went in the owner took us to a large living room in the back, waited for us to stack up then said "when I open this door we need to enter as quickly as possible, and then shut the door again". A little weird, but after entering the room everything seemed normal. Until I saw the gold medals on the wall, and Mo Farah explained that the room was set to the oxygen level of 10k feet so he could train. Opening the door lowered that very quickly. Ya know, just Olympic athlete things. Image source: Late-Astronomer8141

#23

I went to a house a few weeks ago to replace some drain lines under a sink. I opened the cabinet and ~100 roaches came crawling out, I immediately get up and say I can’t do the work until they take care of the roach problem. They didn’t understand why having roaches under your bathroom sink was a problem and genuinely seemed like they didn’t know what to do about it. Image source: Kevinjd44

#24

The number of people who put their litter boxes right next to the furnace filter. You're sucking up the smell and pushing it through the house! Image source: cubizmo2

#25

Image source: swartz77, hatinkatelyn I used to deliver furniture and appliances, and one of the store’s selling points was that we took the old items for free. Houses people smoked in were the worst. We replaced a sofa for a customer and when we pulled the old sofa away from the wall, there was an almost cartoonish outline of it. Except it was outlined by years of cigarette smoke. The walls were white, but stained yellow as you would expect. Beyond disgusting and sad to think about what it does to a person on the inside.

#26

I pet sit. One of the joys of that is getting to see how people live. I sleep in their beds and use their fridges. Luckily, I only ended up having one really bad house - I cleaned it when I first arrived, then again when I left. The rest are just "normal" dirty. Most people do not wipe out their fridge, they rarely clean behind the faucet in the sink, almost never do they clean under the toilet seat. I've even had people not put out clean sheets for me. On average, most people are not as clean as they claim. Image source: eventfarm

#27

Paramedic here. The causal filth is always present, probably 4/5 houses I go into are gross to super gross. I recently went into a penguin house: older couple, house was pristine (like a museum with a cleaning crew), and there were penguins everywhere. Not live birds, hundreds and hundreds of little statues, paintings, life size statues, Lego penguins, photos, human size statues of penguins. I'd bet that they probably have 95%+ of all available penguin art represented in their home. It was one of those patient interactions where I was legitimately distracted by the things around me and I had to actively ignore the penguins and focus on the human with the medical problem. Anyway, one of these 65ish year old people has the Autism (like me) and they don't know it lol. Image source: Krampus_Valet

#28

I had a job that that required me to enter homes to measure windows. Many were messy, cluttered, and/or dirty. One in particular was all three and had more dogs and cats than I could count. Ironically the owner asked if I minded taking off my shoes which I usually did but this time I did so with a great deal of reluctance. Sure enough, my very first step was into a puddle of urine. Not sure if it was dog car or child, but definitely urine. Started taking those little shoe covers with me everywhere after that ! Image source: TopJimmy237

#29

Corporate banking by day, professional organizer on the side. My ex-husband was a legitimate hoarder, and even when it came time to sell the house as part of the divorce, he barely lifted a finger to help purge/declutter the marital home. Outcome? I was forced to clear out the entire house. I couldn't afford to hire professional help either, so the effort fell entirely on my shoulders. There was stuff piled floor to ceiling in every nook and cranny of our (now former) 4,000+ sq ft. house. Harrowing as the experience was, it was also inspiring, and so I launched my own small business doing home organizing/decluttering. Generally speaking? People with tremendous clutter tend to suffer with mental health issues, especially ADHD. Their inability/unwillingness to part with stuff breaks my heart — not only does it pose challenges during the decluttering journey, but my heart also breaks for them, because the clutter takes up extra space in their brain, too, and therefore causes extra stress in their lives. Image source: disjointed_chameleon

#30

I do home repair and I'm often surprised that intelligent professional people don't have the foresight to do seemingly obvious things to prepare for my visit. If I'm doing something that involves working under the kitchen sink, clear it out before I get there. The people who do think of this usually always have minimal things under there and it's pretty clean. The people who don't do it often have an insane amount of stuff shoved under there with at least two liquids that have spilled and a years-old collection of plastic shopping bags. By the time I've pulled everything out there is no room for me or my tools. If I'm going to re-caulk your bathtub, again consider clearing out all the soaps and products and especially that clump of hair you pulled off of the drain and flicked into the corner. I've seen that several times. And removed it myself. I can't install a window treatment when there's a home entertainment center sitting in front of it. Also: If you ask me to take my shoes off, I better not leave your house with chunks of food squished into my socks. I actually carry "house shoes" with me now because of this. If you live in a place that has winter, think about that door weatherization project before it's below freezing outside. If you live on a street with a really challenging parking situation, and you have a driveway, move your car ahead of time so I can park there. I realize that I've digressed from OP's actual question but I've written too much to just delete it. Had to get it off my chest. Image source: prettygoodist

#31

Image source: Turhamkey, turbocharged_autism The number of inoperable cars/lawnmowers in the front yard can be a signifier of how disorderly the inside is. I have been proven wrong, but ordinarily this was a big sign.

#32

You see a lot of unchecked mental illness. hoarding and severe depressions. recently went into an apartment where the entire carpet was wet, feces and urine from her 3 dogs everywhere. i wrote it up as a hazard and didn’t work in her unit. Image source: pregnantdads

#33

This is making me feel better as I have a workman coming later this morning. I have some papers on the counter and I’m in the middle of wrapping Christmas presents, but that sounds fine compared to feces on the floor and weird smells. Image source: donner_dinner_party

#34

As a plumber who’s been in many bathrooms. People need to clean theirs more regularly. Like weekly. Image source: ThroatPuncher

#35

Former pest control tech here. Worked out of Las Vegas for about 7 years before switching to the trades Back in 2013, on my birthday. We used to pick up calls throughout the day, but in this day it was summer, the day was long, and I was tired and wanted to celebrate my birthday. Right as I was wrapping up my last call of the day, a call came in. A lady had bed bugs and wanted me to come and look. I wish I had told them hell no and went home instead. When I arrived, I was blown away. There were bed bugs crawling on the sofa in broad daylight. This was a bad infestation, they were everywhere! Her son was a grown man, sleeping on the couch in his underwear. As I stepped inside, the smell of dirt and B.O. and nasty was so pungent my clothes smelled like it when I left. I could also smell the crystal m**h. I was familiar with the smell, though I never did it myself. It was a thick, heavy smell throughout the house. The kicker was when I turned the corner and saw her young daughter and son (possibly her grandchildren? I never found out, they might have belonged to the underwear boy). They were probably four and seven years old. They were both naked. They looked malnourished, but they were both so sweet. Combined with low pay, after 7 years as a bug guy, I didn't have much longer. C**p like that just sticks to you, I was traumatized by it. I left the industry a month later. I have tons of stories like this both good and bad, but this one stands out to me. I was an apprentice in the IBEW within two months of this. When I got back to the office, I told my manager about it. He called CPS on her. Edited for punctuation. Image source: whoisJSR