‘I clean crime scenes and hoarder houses for a living’

It turns out, there’s something worse than a house where someone has died, and it still turns this Sydney cleaning matriarch’s stomach to think about it.

It all started with a dead rat in a vat of solidified fat. 

“I don’t have to go into too much detail,” chuckles Kellie Polaschek, the mum-of-five who has found herself sifting through some of Sydney’s most shocking homes.

“My husband used to do commercial kitchen cleaning, and he was recounting a story to my sister-in-law, who is an emergency nurse, about a kitchen that was so foul that he was having to shovel rats out of these huge vats of rancid fat,” she continues, “and she said - if you can handle that, you could definitely handle forensic cleaning, and it’s way more money.”

Within months Kellie’s husband had enrolled in a series of courses preparing him for working in extreme - often gruesome - conditions. Fairly soon, he had so much work on that Kellie needed to come on board full-time to handle the demand. 

“Fairly shortly afterwards we were contacted by a law firm to help with a hoarder home - which is how we fell into hoarder cleaning as well,” says Kellie.

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Inside the home of a hoarder. Image: iStock

Mum cleans hoarder homes for a living

Often, the clients that Kellie cleans for have been ordered by authorities to declutter their houses before being allowed to move back in - and she says it can sometimes take six solid weeks of work in order to make them livable again. 

“I’ve seen lots of places where every room has things stacked up to the ceiling,” she tells Kidspot, “there was one lady, she collected things that people left out on the street - it was all stacked up all the way to the ceiling in every room, she had a tiny little tunnel that she would use to come in and out of her front door, and that was it. Another time, my staff found an animal rustling around in all the clutter. They thought it was a huge rat at first, but it turned out to be a live numbat!”

And while hoarders can collect anything you might think of, Kellie says two types of hoarder homes turn her stomach more than even the grisliest crime scenes. 

“Food hoarders and pet hoarders,” she says matter-of-factly when asked what her least favourite jobs are, “I would rather have to clean a 20-person crime scene than smell a cat-hoarding house again.”

“I have a lot of empathy for the clients who we help,” she adds, “hoarding is a mental illness that often comes with a lifetime struggle. A lot of food hoarders, for example, came from a childhood where food might not have been available to them, so it goes very deep. 90 percent of the time, we’ll finish cleaning a hoarding home only to be called back the following year with it back to the way it was.”

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Crime scenes need a professional clean-up too. Image: iStock

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Cleaning the home like a pro

Kellie has partnered with cleaning appliance company Shark to help Aussies unearth their hidden home cleaning crimes in the lead-up to Christmas (when nosey mother-in-laws sweep in looking for dust). 

“The biggest mistake in both crime scene and everyday home cleaning is thinking a home appears tidy to the eye, but there’s dust, grime, dirt - and from my experience, much worse things lurking. In the thousands of crime scenes and hoarder homes I’ve cleaned, the same areas are always missed,” she says.

For busy families with young kids, toy baskets are a particularly grimy dirt-trap. 

“Kids are usually snacking while they’re playing, then bits of food and crumbs end up collecting in the bottom of the toy box for weeks and even months,” she explains.

And what about Kellie’s house? Has all this exposure to gore and hoarding made her a minimalistic clean freak at home?

“What’s that saying? A carpenter’s house is never finished, or something like that?” Kellie laughs.

“I’m not super organised, but I cannot stand dust. One thing that is always done in my house is the vacuuming, but the rest - well, I think I get home from some of these houses and think “you know, mine doesn’t look so bad in comparison!”

Originally published as ‘I clean crime scenes and hoarder houses for a living’