Grim task after rented property left in squalid state
A volunteer fire brigade was expected to today clean a Northland house which an ejected tenant had left in an extreme mess.
But while the house at Te Kopuru alongside the Northern Wairoa River 13km south-east of Dargaville stank of pet urine and was crowded with the tenant's belongings, it wasn't "like those hoarders' homes on TV" as landlord representative Graham Luff had told the Northern Advocate.
The firefighters wouldn't need their breathing apparatus to deal with the clean-up, as Mr Luff had suggested.
And the work they had agreed to do for a donation towards brigade funds wouldn't require fire hoses to shift the rubbish, which wasn't as rank as the collections some Whangarei hoarders have accumulated in the past.