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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m a cleaner… If you don’t keep up on your toilet, I can tell if you’re diabetic. The way your body processes sugars/your meds? leaves a weird film in the bowl, it’s easy to clean, but distinct.

Also, if your water is super hard and you complain that things aren’t coming as clean as you want, stop being cheap and FIX YOUR WATER TREATMENT.

I'm a cleaner, but most of the houses I clean are already fairly clean. I can definitely infer things about how "lived-in" the house is. I can tell the people who's fanily life is very important and have a lot of fun with their kids because their houses have messes in places, crayon drawings, projects, photos up a lot, and travel books or summer camp brochures. Other people might not have kids but have lots of pets, or cooking messes, artwork on all the walls. I can tell these people are home bodies sometimes but they try and live life to fullest.

Some people the vibe is....colder. less clutter or mess everything in its place. Less cooking oil and spices spilled on the stove, the furniture in the living room is less indented disturbed. Cleaned a house once where it looked like the husband and wife lived on opposite sides of the upstairs and hardly interacted.

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.

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.

I enter people’s homes for work.

This is not answering OP’s question. But don’t ever eat potluck food. NO POTLUCKS. Ever.

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.

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.

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 !

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

I clean because I do not want to trip on things. My brother tripped, hit his head and died instantly, age, 46, so, that”s a lesson learned. Dying tripping is true.

Edit: Thank you for those who replied. We are all eventually gonna die but ofcourse we want to delay the inevitable. He died of what he could have avoided. So, let’s just all take it as a lesson in life. Cleanliness really pays off.

Not a tradie but grew up in a messy hoarder house. It is so embarrassing to have electricians etc. come over. I always hide in my bedroom and remain unseen, I can’t bear it. I don’t know how my parents are fine with it.

Not a direct answer but an anecdote. I'm a carpenter and mostly specialize in remodeling people's homes.

Years ago, I was in a home, doing some work on a new master bed and bath setup on the second floor. While coming down the hallway, full of natural light, a picture on the wall caught my eye. I was viewing it from the side angle, so I couldn't see the picture directly as the light glanced off it, like I was viewing it from an a very flat angle, but I could see it was very geometric, lot's of straight intersecting lines. "Oh cool I wonder if it's an aerial view of the city or something". As I got in front of it and viewed it straight on, no... It was their wedding photo. I stepped to the side again and glanced across the flat plane of the glass again. Lots of lines.

That's when I realized they were using their wedding photo to cut up lines of coke, and what I was seeing was the residue from that.