50 Home Professionals Share The Quiet Red Flags They Notice Inside People’s Homes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Worst for me was a litter box on the kitchen counter.

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.

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.

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.

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.