This troper and his girlfriend only keep their apartment marginally clean because he's immunosuppressed after surgery.

In the interest of not being smothered in his sleep, he'd like to point out that she's overworked while he's just lazy.

This troper had a roommate who could hide furniture under his dirty laundry, and later a girlfriend whose apartment needed goat paths through the mess.

This troper had to spend a few days at a friend's house while his parents were on a business trip. He cleaned his room up before I got there. By the end of day two, we had completely hidden the floor under piles of clothes, papers, computer parts, Lego, and other random crap.

His college dorm room isn't faring much better. He has a pile of junk that prevents him from opening all but the top drawer of his dresser, and his roommate perpetually has a literal avalanche of clothes falling out of the closet.

Another troper once knew someone who claimed her incredible squalor was a result of chronic fatigue syndrome, which interestingly did not keep her from traveling, spending an entire day shopping for hobby materials, etc. Her packrat and shopaholic tendencies certainly didn't help, nor did her habit of going into screaming rages over anything being moved. The troper found trying to help this person tunnel out to be a mental-health-damaging impossibility.

You just described my younger sister.

Truly scary response, since the originally described individual is an only child.

This troper suspects that this is the main reason he was muscled out of his apartment by his former roommates. Oddly enough, the guy he replaced was much worse.

*look around apartment* *weep*

This troper's aunt, while quite clean in regards to anything that might smell or make a mess, has stacks and stacks of newspapers in her house, dating back to the 70's, amongst other junk. Her house is actually pretty fun.

This troper never leaves stuff laying on the floor, but his drawers tend to be crammed full of stuff and his desk is covered with books, videogame cases, rock samples and other miscellaneous stuff. His stepsister, on the other hand has a tendency to leave her used clothes in a large pile on the floor of her room. Sometimes the heap of clothes occupies a better portion of the room until she's made to clean it out. This troper's best friend's room is also a mess. Last time he lent him a book it got lost in his floor for a week or so and when he finally got it back, it was in a horrible condition.

This troper's friend has practically littered his bedroom with landmines. The only place you can actually sit on is the bed. Fortunately, that's where everything is.

I'm sorry, landmines?

When this troper was about eleven, her room had attracted mice and eventually a garter snake.

This troper is now feeling a strong desire to clean her room.

This troper never has any problem with rubbish, as such. Wrappers, leftovers, etc are all thrown away or cleaned. However, his books and papers (and there are a ''lot'' of them) have a tendency to spread, as though by osmosis, until every flat surface is covered, and his bookcase/cupboards seem just as full as before.

This troper has an excuse for the books on his floor - he's out of bookshelf space and has no room for another one. He does try to keep the garbage under control. In a related vein, the dishes only get washed when he runs out of spoons.

For a single guy, this troper's apartment is almost immaculate...except for the kitchen, which gets cleaned perhaps once every solstice and equinox. Also, I have an odd habit of whenever I clean dishes in the dishwasher, I don't empty them out once they're done. Whenever I need a clean dish, I get it out of the dishwasher. When the dishwasher approaches empty, that's when I know I need to refill it.

That's' just like this troper (except for the kitchen being the exception), except she knows it's time to do another load of dishes when she needs to clear room to make a meal.

When this troper had the house to himself while the rest of his family was on vacation for two weeks (someone had to watch all twelve pets and the idea of two weeks away from them all was too good to pass up) he cleaned up the entire house in 2 days, threw a 3-day LAN party which didn't trash the house either, and kept the place spotless for right up until everyone else came home. They turned it back into a pigsty within 24 hours.

This troper pitched in to clean up a friend's apartment some years ago while he was visiting his dad in San Fransisco. OhMyGods the place was horrible, and we had been gaming there for months! Bags of garbage had attracted ''clouds'' of fruit flies. Somehow, he had managed to forget an ''entire pizza'' in a ''cupboard''. One of us, while cleaning up, had to excuse himself to the balcony to vomit.

My own place is only slightly better, if I'd ever regularly bother to do dishes and take out the recycling.

My dorm room had, let's see...six pizza boxes, three garbage bags, books all over the place, broken plastic spoons (don't ask), and hadn't been vacuumed...as of last Friday when I started cleanup.

This troper has been yelled at by her parental units to clean up her bedroom all the time. True. it looks like a bomb hit it, and there are empty bottles of seltzer water, books, clothes and all sorts of items scattered all over the floor to the point where her family members have come to joke that Jimmy Hoffa is buried in her closet, and it'd probably be a much easier place to sleep in if she could actually clear the floor so her convector could be fixed nice and proper, and perhaps prepare to re-paint the walls and get new carpeting, but really... I rather like the mess. As it stands, I have orders pending from my mother to clean my room up over the winter break or face death. Or something just as unpleasant.

This troper can beat every single story on this page. Her great uncle recently had a heart attack and had to be moved to a nursing home. His house...Dear God, the mess was unholy. He had stopped using his front door years ago, because there was so much trash. There were alternating layers of trash and dead mice. His water had stopped working, so he had been urinating in bottles and defecating in bags...''and keeping them in the bathroom instead of throwing them away.'' My aunt got a terrible upper respiratory infection from some mold or something. My family went over to collect some books, and he had ''over 5000 books, with multiple copies of several.'' He had 100 ''loaded pistols'' strewn randomly throughout the house, and he smoked, and would just light up and drop the matches or the cigarette butts wherever he stood. He also kept multiple tins of Sterno and campfire materials, and lots of gunpowder and bullets- it's a miracle the place didn't blow up. The house was built in 1912, and used to be a really beautiful house, but he trashed it so badly it will have to be torn down. We've already cleared out 2 dumpsters worth of stuff, and no end in sight. The worst part, though? When we first went to the house, my brother went in a closet that looked like it hadn't been used in years. He called out "You've got to come here!" So I went... and we found my great-uncle's PornStash, ranging from antique Playboys and Penthouses (1950s-70s) to literally hundreds of novels with names like "Orgy at Sea" to really, really horrible stuff like the Marquis De Sade. I took about a three-hour shower when I got home, and I was seriously debating boiling my hands after we moved that stuff out, and I am no prude. BrainBleach...please! This was HORRIBLE- learn from our experience, if you've got a relative displaying pack-rat tendencies, get them help IMMEDIATELY!

This Troper wholeheartedly agrees with the first statement.

That's called squalor and it's indeed a psychological condition that ''needs'' professional assistance.

This troper had to clean up one of those himself, urine bottles included, thankfully not the other bags... but these were everywhere instead of just the bathroom. Fortunately it had not been quite so long and he only had the entire bottom level of the house this way. 3 rooms, all waist deep.

This troper has picked up the Move Through Cover special rule as a result of regularly having to move through his deep, deep piles of books. Reading in bed + fast reader + lazy + fan of very thick fantasy novels = ranks in Profession (mountaineer).

This troper's friend's old apartment: single bedroom, holding 3 single, adult, males. A three month old pile of dishes in the kitchen that they didn't clean in hopes "it'll gain sentience and we can charge it rent," which eventually were cleaned in straight CLR. An unseeable floor on account of bedding, clothing, and garbage. Two house cats with a litterbox that was rarely looked after. A fort of pizza boxes on the deck that attracted hordes of flies in the summer. Now that they've moved out and into bigger apartments, they keep things cleaner then before.

This troper is actually fairly normal when it comes to keeping his home clean. Sure, there's a few items laying about on the counters or the table, but it's not so bad. But glance inside his car and you'll think that a garbage truck exploded. The last time he cleaned it out, it took 3 full hours.

Same goes for Da_Nuke, whose room is rather clean if only slightly messy at times, but whose car is always ''full'' of dirt, papers, bags and garbage. The body is always encrusted with dirt and dust. And the trunk is unusable on account of being full of empty bottles of oil and steering fluid.

On a different note, this weekend Da_Nuke went with his parents to deliver a bed base for his sister studying at the neighboring state. They ended up cleaning tons and tons of dishes, cleaning the kitchen range with lye, and clearing two bags of garbage lying around inside. And even worse: ''he cleaned a bag of garbage mixed with dog urine and excrement''. He left a message for his sister saying she owed him a bottle of Moët & Chandon Champagne Impériale for this. And on top of that, it is said that the previous owner had an ''even worse'' mess on account of throwing big, rowdy parties 5 times a week...

....I really should clean this heap of trash sometime.

Did you know that if you leave orange peel out for long enough, it can go ''past'' dried-up and easy to clean up "later" and become a mass of black, fuzzy mould? Yeah. I was living in a perpetually damp dorm room that was demolished a year later. I'm lucky I don't have allergies. (The thing that finally prompted me to clean up my act was the fruit flies. I HATE flies.) These days my room's not so bad, if you can find the right places to put your feet between the piles of clothes and books.

This troper's garage was pretty messy before he helped fix up most of it. Still, I have a lot of things in it.

This troper's dorm room, though not particularly filled with garbage, is filled with yards upon yards of wires, all criss-crossing about his room. As of this posting, the wires within his reach are: An external soundcard attatched to his laptop via USB, a long wire going from that to the subwoofer, which has wires leading to speakers all around the room, a surge protector plugged into another surge protector, with each plug filled, providing power to a laptop, TV, speaker set, numerous fans, a PS3, air compressor/airbrush, phone, PSP/DS charger, two external HDDs, a fridge, microwave, radio/iPod dock, and other things. All this in a dorm room about 8 feet by 15 feet. Needless to say, he has problems walking through the place.

This troper and her family make a deep house clean up once a week for lack of time. Naturally, once it's time to clean her share of the house. Naturally, some parts often looks like this. Specially the house's studio room where the main computer and all kind of electric stuff are.

This troper's grandmother lives in a house with my blind, diabetic aunt. The house has many bedrooms (I'm not actually sure how many, so deep is the trash) since it once housed seven kids, only a few of which are now usable. Unlike many of the examples on this list, it's not actually wanton garbage that fills the house, just lots of ''stuff'', as my grandmother is an extreme pack rat. Oh yeah, and don't eat the food. Dear God, there's enough food in that house to feed a serious number of people for a very long time if there ever is another depression, as long as they don't mind that it's at least five or six years old...and be very wary of the basement. There's a breed of mutated cricket-spider-thing that is indigenous only to my grandmother's basement. Probably it feeds on the dead rats. Did I mention that the inhabitants of this house are an ''eighty year-old woman'' and a ''blind diabetic''? When the only thing safe to consume is the beer, the kinds of games you find yourself playing at family reunions often are something like "let's get wasted, pull aged leftover dishes out of one of the refrigerators, eat them and try to guess what food they are".

The desk and table in this troper's room look a bit like that. But that's nothing compared to some of my relatives. My aunt, uncle and cousins own a three-storey house, where two rooms and the kitchen are more or less clean, but the rest of the house is just a place to store all kinds of junk that they ''might need later''.

This troper is not that bad. Honestly. Yes, you cant see the floor because of papers strewn everywhere, but there's only one layer, and when I do clean it only takes ~10-15 minutes. I just dont get rid of it because it comes back in a week when I do.

A friend is prone to developing what he and others call a "floordrobe," where everything from clothes to textbooks to manga wind up scattered around somewhere. Surprisingly, very little actual trash ends up in the floordrobe, so it's an oddly sanitary mess. Now imagine one of those, waist-high in some places. That's what ''my'' old bedroom in my mother's house looked like until just recently, after about eleven years of the room being lived in for no more than a couple months at a time, and used as a dumping ground for "might be useful/still wanted later" stuff. It turns out the carpet in that old room is sky blue. Who knew?

This troper is admittedly quite bad with cleaning; He likes his organized messes and isn't even near the extreme cases, so why should it bother people?

This troper can see one part of her floor: the part where the door opens. Clothes, books, boxes of tea, video games, and cans of food cover the rest. Mostly clothes. Actually, she can't see a corner of her room for all the mess...

This troper's room would look like this, but for some reason the pile never seems to actually get any bigger. WHERE DOES IT ALL GO!?

This troper is bit of an organized thrash type, but the shared living room in my apartment is absolutely terrible: piles of dishes, a thrashcan that's overflowing because no-one wants to take it out, towels and clothes randomly strewn over furniture, a floor that's in desperate need of a mopping...but I only ever come there to cook, so I can live with it.

This troper has to wade through beer bottles, cardboard boxes, and torn garbage bags just to do his laundry. Ironically, the house looks a hell of a lot worse than before we got a maid to clean it up.

This troper once saw a '''car''' that looked like this. Every seat except the drivers seat was completely unsittable, and I'm surprised the owner could actually drive it. I could tell some stuff was probably from TheSeventies. I can only imagine what her house was like.

Almost sounds like ''my'' car. For example, I have a bad habit of eating fast food then tossing the bag in the backseat to get "later". But since I rarely have people in my backseat, things tend to...collect over time.

This trope appears in this troper's life as well. While outright garbage was usually disposed of in a proper manner, leaving only a relatively sanitary mess of papers, gadgets, and tchotchkes, the pile was at least a foot deep. I could literally tell how old something was by which stratum it was buried in. My room has since been cleaned up significantly, and is now only somewhat cluttered.

Back in the 1980's, one of this troper's former neighbors, known as the "Pieman", was an obsessive collector, and his house got trashed to the point of being condemned. Luckily, another neighbor came to his aid and helped him return to his family. More recently, there's another house around the corner that looks like it may be a garbage house (overgrown front yard, carport with grimy disused vehicles and trash, etc).

This troper used to help her mother clean up foreclosed houses. It might not sound so bad until you realize that when people get foreclosed on, they usually say "screw sanitation" and completely trash the place.

My house when I was PromotedToParent for a week while my mum was in hospital. Six kids aged between 16 and 2, home alone with little interference from our dad, who wasnt living with us. We ran out of clean plates, every surface of the kitchen was covered in dirty dishes, and we only washed them when we ran out. The cushions were off the sofa (little brother pulled them off to play with, there was no floor space in the bedroom and there was toys everywhere. There was cereal on the floor and a baby bottle filled with week old milk was left on the table. The second time I ever saw a house filled with so much trash was when my friend had a WildTeenParty and every surface was filled with empty beer cans and food, the kitchen floor was sticky and there was food crushed into the carpet.

This troper's mother cleans out foreclosed houses. Worst house ever? Belonged to a dead cat lady. Nearly every room in the house was literally so full of junk that you couldn't enter them, with just little pathways from the living room couch to the kitchen. All of cats had urinated and defecated on the carpet so much that (apparently) the old lady just gave up on cleaning and put over a new carpet over it. The new carpet was just as filthy by the time she died. All of the food had expired months or years before she died, and she had apparently taped thousands of episodes of television, in addition to all the videos she bought. The cats were all gone (along with the [=DVDs=] and other valuables) by the time it was cleaned out, but they found 20 odd dead cats, which were kind of liquefied from heat and age and the weight of all the crap they were under.

I've seen a few in my time (one of which I had to regularly suppress my gag reflex to enter the kitchen of) but I myself still tend towards this: I've had to, on occasion, expunge foot-high stacks of papers and other random objects, and I'm still not very organized. At one point, we were all but convinced we had a flea problem.

My workaholic mother's apartment is this, as was her house beforehand, which got condemned; the house was a fire hazard infested with mice, the apartment's also a fire hazard and I'm suspicious it's also infested, especially with fleas from our now-dead cats (which I'm lucky they aren't in there). I was also raised in these environments, and never had been able to maintain a remotely clean space for myself until I moved out about two months ago. Tried to clean at times while I lived with my mother, but when you're the only one actually doing anything to pick up the mess and more is just made every day...

My room is a mess magnet. Every time I clean it, it's back to its usual mess within a week. The worst part is all the paper. I have a bad tendency to just toss whatever papers I don't need on the floor by the side of my bed. There is a huge pile now, and a fair portion of it has made its way all over the rest of the room. The main pile is up against the closet door and frequently pushes it open. Opening the door causes an avalanche, and closing it is difficult. In addition to this, there is a perpetual pile of dirty clothes in the corner and the room has been known to have 8 used cups at any given time.

My middle school Home-Ec room was like this, to the point that she had ''cans of soup'' that had gone bad. None of the students actually bothered cleaning any of the dishes they used, so they were perpetually moldy with about 5 years of uncleaned grime, and I actually started playing bingo with the infestations. Cockroaches, 3 different species of ants, mice, rats, and a BIRD that lived in the air vent. Over one long-term break it had somehow managed to get inside the room and covered everything in feces which she ''ignored completely!'' I'm VERY surprised she wasn't fired before she was, and the only reason she was is because she had to get back surgery, and the long-term sub was horrified at the mess in there. I actually refused to even TOUCH anything but my chair in there, for fear of diseases. I can assure you that I will never let any living area I'm even partially responsible for get that messy.