For Jo Powell, cleaning is about restoring dignity and understanding the grief and shame behind every pile of rubbish.
London and Whitstable, United Kingdom – It’s an unusually warm day in mid-November, and 43-year-old Jo Powell is rolling up her sleeves as she enters a bedroom filled with piles of clothing and bags stuffed to the brim with documents and other paraphernalia.
It’s hard to walk around without tripping, so Jo is treading carefully. Two small dressers on either side of the bed are submerged under books and tissue paper. Only the mattress, adorned by a colourful crocheted throw, isn’t buried under other objects.
Jo, the director of Hoarder Clean Up UK, is spending the morning in this semidetached home in a southeast London suburb. Her client, Emily, a pseudonym, is a woman in her mid-30s who asked that her identity be withheld for privacy reasons.
Emily has booked Jo for half a day to start clearing her elderly mother’s room so that a new bed can be delivered. When Jo arrived, she briefly met the mother downstairs, and the petite, frail-looking woman seemed wary of the cleanup plan despite having ordered the bed herself. Emily gently reminded her mother why Jo was there, and the older woman reluctantly agreed before retreating to the living room.
Jo sets down her bin bags, rubber gloves, cleaning spray, a brush and a duster on top of a desk by the door. Her arms akimbo, she begins surveying the cluttered space.
“This is what it’s like,” says Emily, her hands motioning towards the piles, her face flushed as she follows Jo’s gaze across the room. “There’s also mould on the windows, and the toilet needs dealing with. I know it’s probably not the worst case you’ve seen, but I just want her to be comfortable.”
“No problem,” Jo says, smiling as she reaches for an empty box she’s spotted under the desk. She asks Emily if she can help decide what should be kept, and the latter agrees. “We’ll work quickly but also be careful,” Jo tells her.
‘Making them feel human’
One of her colleagues calls about a hoarding client they’ve helped recently — a woman who lived with rubbish all around her home and cat faeces scattered across the floor.
Jo insists that her staff keep bagged waste discreetly inside the properties or gardens until there’s enough to fill a dump truck. The aim is to spare people the embarrassment of having neighbours witness a skip being filled over several days. She also tries to work only with waste-removal firms that are respectful to her clients.
This time, however, something’s gone wrong. The contracted removal team was rude to the woman and invoiced her directly instead of billing Jo’s company, as they should have. Upset, the woman forwarded the invoice to Jo’s colleague, explaining how distressed she was.
“I’m not having that,” Jo says sternly. “I don’t want to use this company any more if they’re going to be judging people like this.”
When she ends the call, she’s glum.
“I already know we’ve lost her confidence. We probably needed more visits to her property to really clean it out, but that chance is gone now,” she sighs.
“It’s so sensitive, and her emotions are so heightened. I’m putting myself in her shoes – she probably wouldn’t want us to come back. Even though we’ve done nothing wrong.”
Jo learned quickly when she started hoarder cleaning to adapt to her customers’ needs.
“Everyone is different, and it’s important to respect that,” she says. “Some people don’t want sympathy; they just want to crack on with it. Others want to talk, and you leave knowing their life stories. It’s not just manpower. It’s moral support.”
Her job, she believes, is to take “baby steps” towards helping people “feel dignified and making them feel human again”, rather than “ransacking the place like a bull in a china shop”.
“It sounds corny,” she says enthusiastically, “but I just love being able to help others. I genuinely do want to make a difference.”
When recalling past cases, she grows animated, as if she’s right there at the scene again.
One early client lived just a stone’s throw from the department store Harrods, in one of the most expensive parts of London.
“You know what it’s like when you can’t find something, and you think, I’ll just buy another one? Well, she was like that with umbrellas,” Jo says, chuckling at the memory.
“I think we counted 24 of them.”
Jo and her colleague built a good rapport with the woman over several days of clearing, with the three having lunch together.
She convinced the woman to donate many of her unneeded belongings to charity. Eventually, they cleared her bed so she could sleep in it for the first time in years, instead of on a chair. The woman was so grateful to Jo that she asked her to go duvet shopping with her to celebrate.
Another time, Jo helped a client who had lived with her mother until the parent died. She sensed the woman was still grieving, and her mother’s room was almost completely hoarded to the door.
While cleaning, Jo found a gift bag with a pebble inside. Instead of throwing it away, she asked if it might be sentimental. The client became emotional, explaining that the pebble was tied to a happy memory with her late mother. “It’s why we have to take care while cleaning, even if there’s a lot of stuff to get through,” Jo says. “Even really small objects that you might miss might really matter to somebody.”
Some jobs, meanwhile, have been disconcerting.
Jo was once clearing out piles of paper and books from a client’s study when her assistant entered, whispering in alarm that he was sitting outside, stroking his collection of long knives.
As she cleaned, “he followed me around quite a bit,” Jo remembers. “That was really uncomfortable.”
Her assistant, who had a black belt in jiujitsu, made sure Jo was never left alone in a room with the man.
And yet, despite concern for her safety, Jo felt sympathy for the man. Through snippets of conversation, she learned that he had a wife and two adult sons who no longer had anything to do with him.
“In one of the bedrooms, there were still board games and toys from the time the boys were small, and none of it was salvageable,” she remembers, her tone sombre.
The need to hoard
Something Jo often tells the people she helps to put them at ease is that everybody — including her — “feels the need to hoard in some way”.
She goes to retrieve a large box from her garage, and brings it to her office. Inside, wrapped in layers of paper and bubble wrap, is a heavy black metal bull figurine.
“Oh no!” she exclaims in dismay as she gingerly removes it. “Look, its horn has fallen off!”
Her mother had loved bulls and collected dozens of them. Some sit on shelves around Jo’s home today, but the rest are in storage.
“My mum’s gone nearly 21 years now, but I can’t bear to sell them or get rid of them,” she explains. “What’s the point of my keeping them? Bulls are not even my thing,” she adds, but the objects are a link to her mother.
“This is what I tell my clients: Something could seem like a waste to everyone else, but we still want to hold on to it.”
She takes out a plastic container full of her mother’s belongings that she hasn’t touched in decades.
“I don’t even know what some of these are,” she confesses, rifling through envelopes stuffed with documents. “Probably from her time in America when she was working there.”
She gets visibly excited when she finds a book of children’s poetry, its browning pages coming apart at the bind.
“Oh my God, I remember this! My mum used to read it to me,” she says.
As she tenderly puts everything back into the box, she adds ruefully, “And now it’s probably going to go back into storage, and I’ll never look at it again.”
Jo heads outside, where her chickens peck at the grass near the small patch of earth where her favourite cockerel, Shim, was buried four months ago. The colourful splint she once made for him when he had a bad leg – with its three bright toes jutting upward – lies on top of his burial spot.
“It actually worked really well,” she says. “But he just suddenly died.”
Jo pauses, watching the other chickens move across the grass. “Chickens are very good at hiding what’s really wrong with them,” she says.
As she returns to the house, she muses about another query for hoarder cleaning she’s just received. Each time she sees a new message, she’s reminded that every potential client represents someone who summoned up the courage to reach out after years, possibly decades, of managing alone.
“You come across so much in this job, there’s really nothing I haven’t seen,” she says. “People need to know that they can get help without being judged. So it’s really important to tailor how you act with each individual and get to know them as much as you can.”
What she carries forward from her own experience of grief and late-night cleaning is an understanding of what it means to push through life’s struggles: not perfectly, but with determination and not alone.
“That’s what I’m trying to do with my work,” she says. “Just to be there for my clients, and support them through something difficult, with a laugh if that’s possible.”
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Comments
My wife and I have been helping a friend of the family move and part of it was dealing with the hoarding. The part in the article about "just buying a new umbrella" is so relatable. We where moving our friend and she needed an extension cord, rather than looking through her boxes, her first instinct was to just order a new one (she already have 15, but she didn't want to look for them, in her 40sqm apartment).
Deciding on what to keep and what to get rid of it also mental struggle for those helping. In our case we just watched as kitchen equipment, complete, and expensive, dinner set, furniture, art, family heirlooms and new unworn clothes got de- prioritized in favour of unread magazines, hundreds of VHS tapes, and thousands of DVDs and BluRays with endless recording of talkshows and random TV programs. She has been following a second rate pop duo band since the 1970s and the idea of missing an article or a TV appearance is unthinkable, so tossing valuable belongings is preferable to throwing out 5 years of unopened magazine on the off chance that there might be a nugget of information she didn't have. It's mentally taxing seeing someone basically throwing away their life that way. We know that she'll never look through those magazine or even hook up the VHS player to figure out which tapes to keep. When she dies, all that's left is a ton of junk which her family do not care about and it will all go to the dump.
I have such huge respect for anyone spending their time helping hoarders every day, the mental load is just massive.
I have a hoarder friend, who is very cognizant that she suffers from a mental illness.
Her motif is a bit different: she has childhood trauma from her mother secretly throwing away her things, and assigns emotional value to anything that might be usable in the future (essentially safeguarding it against secret destruction by the mental image of her mother).
But likewise, her sense of value is all skewed.
By throwway120385 2026-01-2322:13 I've known someone like that too, and in her case it's because she never had anything when she was a kid. So she can take agonizingly long to let go of anything even if it's obviously ruined or worthless because it might be useful in some undefined way in the future.
By mrweasel 2026-01-2319:43 While I don't think this is trauma in the traditional sense, it might be something similar. My father-in-law, who known her for decades, told me that it's a crush on one of the band members. Basically a teenage crush that never got resolve or replaced by actual relationships.
By NoSalt 2026-01-2316:36 Ok, I really want to know the name of the "second rate pop duo band".
I had a couple of thousand books in my flat in london, including about 500 technical computing ones (design, languages, other stuff). I got my nephew to fix up the flat, for sale. He asked me "Which of these books do you want to keep?", my response after a few seconds "None".
It's so easy to hang on to things you really don't need.
By davidwritesbugs 2026-01-2315:263 reply That's particularly true of tech books. I want to hang on to my copy of "Tinker Tailor" but "Adobe Air in Action" 2008?
That's a sad indictment of tech.
Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book, Beej's Guide, Sipser,...); but we seem set on producing an endless, pointless, churn of frameworks and minor language differences in the name of progress.
By zabzonk 2026-01-2315:53 > Most underlying technology is timeless (see TAOCP, SICP, CLRS, K&R, GoF, Dragon Book,
True enuf, but how often do you actually refer to the books underlying ideas? I've had (now gone, presumably) TAOCP on my bookshelves for years, but how often did I use it? Stuff on RNG a bit, I guess...
By fud101 2026-01-243:36 TAOCP is trash. I wish I grew up in the era where you could just hit up zlib for an accessible book on any topic instead of highly rated and hardly read 'classics' like TAOCP.
By zabzonk 2026-01-2315:43 Yeah, well, I do kind of miss "The Design & Evolution of C++", but I can't convince myself I actually need it.
By jz391 2026-01-246:38 True for many, but I actually have been acquiring some computing books I had enjoyed reading in my youth (e.g. Organick's Multics). Perhaps living permanently abroad strengthens nostalgia...
By julesallen 2026-01-2316:46 There’s need and there’s want I suppose.
My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM.
Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.
You're not afraid you're going to need that UCSD Pascal book from 1986?
My physics textbooks look impressive sitting on a bookself even if I never open them again. I only need a few books like that to prove I'm smart though. "I swear someday I will open my calculus textbook again and do all the exercises..."
It's fun to find a colleague's collection of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming Books books and open them to hear the crack of a book that's never been opened before.
By throwway120385 2026-01-2322:14 We buy them to pay homage to Knuth more than to work through the exercises.
By klatchex_too 2026-01-2323:152 reply That's why if you're a poser like me, you buy them used in poor shape.
By B1FIDO 2026-01-2323:17 Of course you do! Any student who has read/seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince knows: the most dog-eared, worn-out, scribbled-up textbook is the best textbook you could hope for!
By c22 2026-01-2412:45 I like when there's stuff underlined and scribbled in the margins. You get to see exactly how far the last user got--often just a chapter or two.
By ghaff 2026-01-2316:04 I've gotten rid of a bunch of books. Don't care a lot so long as they now fit my bookshelves. But will probably dump another bag or two to my library's next book sale next fall.
By ThrowawayR2 2026-01-243:11 Oof, that's hitting below the belt, man ....
By esafak 2026-01-2318:11 That does not mean they were all useless, of course; maybe you have absorbed some of them.
By thisislife2 2026-01-2314:294 reply I've moved houses 3 times in the last 3 years. The pain of moving all my personal belongings made me realise how much unnecessary stuff I had accumulated. So I made it a point to throw or give away many things that was no longer really needed. It was a revelation and now I am more mindful to storing anything for long-term without thought. I still have more than 2+ decades of stuff in a storage - books, sentimental stuffs, things I thought may be useful or needed in the future etc. Still figuring out how to go through all that.
By laborcontract 2026-01-2314:501 reply This applies to both physical and digital goods. I've tried to think hard about how to keep my digital life in order in a way that my kids will be understand to make some sense of. I'm not there yet but I am mindful of it.
Trying to explain the sentimental value of your belongings to others is like trying to explain a dream.
By rationalist 2026-01-2314:531 reply I'm not a hoarder, but my dad is.
I have a couple of items from my dead grandparents, and it's a connection.
It's a tangible connection that feels more real than something intangible like memories.
As for my dad though, I have no idea. He recognizes that it's a problem, but can't stop. It's stuff like plastic ship models, or stuff he wants to buy on eBay - postcards from defunct airlines that he used to fly on.
By laborcontract 2026-01-2314:563 reply That makes sense, but don't you think hoarding muddies the signal? Do you know what of your father's you'd want to keep of his hoarded goods?
By rationalist 2026-01-2314:591 reply There is nothing that he has hoarded that I want to keep. I have told him that.
I have told him that he has so much stuff, that it would be impossible for me to recognize the $1,000 model boxes from the worthless model boxes, and that when he dies, I'm just going to have to wholesale the lot for probably a penny on the dollar.
I told him him that the people who will pay money for plastic model kits are the same age as him, and if they all die around the same time or before him, there will be no one to buy the model kits.
I've had the same discussion with my parents. They wanted me to go through their home and mark down everything I want. I don't want any of it and frankly dealing with a full house of stuff after they die is something I dread. I wouldn't even know where to start. Are there companies you can hire that will take care of everything?
By technion 2026-01-2321:14 Australian here. I paid a garbage removal company to basically empty a house. Their qebsite called it "estate cleanup". It took a whole day for a team with crowbars to smash up every piece of furniture and load it in a truck and take it.
People take this offensively and insist someone must have wanted an old chest of drawers or something if only put it on facebook marketplace and work with interested parties and assist with them obtaining it - but those people dont realise how much they are asking of someone who is dealing with loss.
By a2tech 2026-01-2315:57 Yes, they’re called clean out companies. They’ll swoop in and put everything in a dumpster. You can engage an auction house-+cleanout company if you think they have anything worth selling.
The only people who want to pick through a hoard to find the "good stuff" is other hoarders and flippers.
Also, 90% of the time that the act of hoarding ruins the objects hoarded so everything becomes trash anyways.
By rationalist 2026-01-2316:16 > 90% of the time that the act of hording ruins the objects horded.
I can also attest to this.
By rationalist 2026-01-2315:041 reply > don't you think hoarding muddies the signal?
Yes, which I am thankful now that I only have a couple of items and haven't had to make the choice of what to keep or not.
By laborcontract 2026-01-2315:19 Thank you for sharing.
By Bluecobra 2026-01-2314:47 I’m in a similar situation, after dealing with the deaths of multiple parents I don’t want my descendants to have a huge burden of stuff and I’ve been on a mission to purge as much as possible. Facebook Marketplace has been great to get rid of a lot of the more bulky stuff. It’s great, you post a picture and someone comes to your house to pick it up cash in hand. Low value stuff gets donated to goodwill or my local Buy Nothing/Free Stuff group on Facebook. Also been doing a tidy amount of sales on eBay for smaller/more valuable items.
Still have a lot of progress to make. At least my game collection on Steam will be easy to clean up.
By mythical_39 2026-01-2315:303 reply Put it into a storage locker. Pre-pay 5 years of fees on the locker. Wait 5 years.
This is what we call a 'self-sovling-problem'
By klatchex_too 2026-01-2323:22 Where I live none of the storage companies will let you pre-pay 1 year of rent let alone 5.
A major part of their business model is giving low initial rates and then raising the rent over and over knowing what a pain it will be for the renters to move to a different storage place.
The industry acronym for the strategy is "ECRIs", existing customer rate increases, and it is a profitability metric they track.
By thisislife2 2026-01-2315:371 reply To be clear, it is in storage for the past 2+ decade. It was moving houses every year, the last few years, with only the essentials, that made me realise how much of a hoarder I was. Nevertheless, dumping it somewhere and "forgetting" about it is not much of a solution - as someone else said here, you are just passing on the problem to the next generation.
By tonyedgecombe 2026-01-2316:04 I think the implication is once the fees stop being paid it ceases to be your problem. The storage company will sell the contents of your locker.
By arethuza 2026-01-2314:48 A few years back we "decluttered" our house in order to make it more appealing for sale and put all the stuff in storage. After the property eventually sold we went back and looked at the stuff we had stored and probably threw out 80% of it.
