The kitchen of Laura’s client Rachel* (Picture: Supplied)

When Laura Dent gets ready for her job as a cleaner, she neatly packs a hazmat suit into her bag, that will to go on top of her work polo and trousers.

The night before she will have loaded up her van, making sure she has the right gloves and masks for the job, then she checks again the next morning.

The cleaning that Laura and her team does isn’t your average dust and hoover. It’s work that changes and – literally – saves lives, as she and her team help people living with hoarding disorder.

On the first day of a big job, they tend to only use bin bags, bio-waste sacks, small shovels and a dustpan and brush, as cleaning products often aren’t needed until a few days later.

Before each new appointment, staff talk about the sensitivities of the job and prepare themselves for what they will do if the client doesn’t let them into the home.

‘We will go over the plan for the day, chat about anything that could arise and how we will make the client comfortable,’ explains Laura, who has been helping people struggling with hoarding disorder for the past three years.

Recently she has seen a rise in the number of doctors and nurses, among others with high stress jobs, ask for support.

‘They are seeing everything in its raw state and it takes its toll on their mental health,’ Laura tells Metro.co.uk. ‘We’ve had quite a few following the pandemic.’

Hoarding expert Laura Dean has been called to help a number people in high stress jobs (Picture:

One of her clients is Rachel*, a supervisor in the emergency services who runs a busy and high-stress control room.

Working nights and long hours, when Rachel used to finish her shift, she would dread arriving home.

Coming through the front door, she would have to push against a mound of rubbish and boxes to get in and, once inside, she would pick over an obstacle course made of junk and unopened packages past an unusable bathroom, into the sitting room.

‘I knew exactly how and where I could stand. I had a pathway picked out,’ Rachel tells Metro.co.uk. ‘I have poor mobility, so It was incredibly precarious.’

She lived off shop-bought sandwiches because her kitchen was impassable and unsafe to use. It had long-since become uninhabitable, piled high with rubbish, packaging and empty cat food pouches, which started to smell and become a home to maggots. Instead, she sat in the same place on the sofa each night, too tired to clear up and too confined to do anything else.

‘I was literally watching TV through a gap in the rubbish. It was awful, suffocating,’ Rachel admits.

‘Everything was so compressed. I literally had boxes up to the ceiling. It was claustrophobic and I couldn’t open the windows to let in any fresh air. It was closing in around me on all sides.’

Rachel’s kitchen before (Picture: Supplied)

Rachel’s kitchen after Laura’s team had visited (Picture: Supplied)

‘Although the house didn’t really smell, it didn’t feel clean – althoughyou do go noseblind,’ she admits. ‘There were flies in the kitchen and I’d buy six-packs of fly spray on Amazon, going in sporadically to spray it.’

Rachel, 50, is one of an estimated 2%-6% of the population who suffers with hoarding disorder, a condition characterised by the acquisition of an excessive number of items – often stored in a chaotic manner.

She had been living that way since lockdown. In constant pain with muscle weakness around her knees and in her shoulders, bending over is difficult and Rachel walks with a crutch.

When her housekeeper could no longer visit during lockdown, Rachel became increasingly isolated. The rubbish piled up to an extent that she couldn’t ask her back when restrictions were lifted.

‘The mess started then and I never really got back on top of things,’ she remembers. ‘

It wasn’t hoarding in the traditional sense; I would struggle to take the rubbish out, so I put it by the back door, and then it got to the point that I couldn’t actually get out the back door, so it began piling up inside.’

Rachel is one of an estimated 2%-6% of the population who suffers with hoarding disorder (Picture: Supplied)

However, her problem was exacerbated by compulsive shopping. With the best of intentions, Rachel would order cleaning products and books online. But the almost-daily deliveries piled up and she stopped opening the boxes. Ashamed of the mess, the piles became unmanageable.

‘I wasn’t buying anything expensive. I would buy maybe five books a month and some of them might be second hand. I’d spend around £200 a month, but a lot of the packages I just didn’t open. It looked worse than it was because I was buying little and often and I couldn’t get rid of the boxes.

‘Every week I’d think I’d get on top of it the next week, but my mobility would be bad or I would be laid up, and I never did. Then Istopped inviting people around, because I was so ashamed.’

By January, Rachel – who also suffers from anxiety and depression – realised she needed help, but she was also looking after her elderly parents, after her mother had a heart attack

‘I was trying to cope with them. After looking after them and focusing on work, I neglected myself,’ she remembers.’You always think that this is the type of thing that happens to other people, but it is surprisingly easy to end up this way.’

Rachel got trapped in her living room for eight hours after falling(Picture: Supplied)

One Sunday evening in October 2023, Rachel’s knees gave way as she got up from the sofa, and piles of books and boxes fell on top of her. She was trapped.

Rachel lay there for eight hours, unable to move and unable to call for help.

‘I was lying in a very narrow gap between the sofa and the piles of rubbish,’ she recalls. ‘I couldn’t get myself positioned to get back up. The more I thrashed around – everything – boxes, books, piles of rubbish, just fell on top of me.

‘I thought, if I am still here in the morning I am going to have to call the ambulance service and they will have to force entry. I couldn’t believe I was in this position.

Eventually losing consciousness, she woke in the early hours and managed to get into a position to pull herself up.

Black and blue but unbroken, she was ready to ask for help – and that’s how she met Laura.

After going online to look for support, she discovered her company, So Fresh And So Clean, which specialises in mental health crisis cleans.

‘A lot of people are coming back to their spaces from being in high stress situations, they just haven’t got the capacity to maintain their home.’ (Picture: Supplied)

Laura and her team work with clients slowly and compassionately.(Picture: Supplied)

‘There is a link between loneliness and hoarding, as well as work-related stress,’ Laura explains.

‘A lot of people are coming back to their spaces from being in high stress situations, and their energy levels are so low and they feel so down, that they just haven’t got the capacity to maintain their home.

‘They kind of shut down; it’s like a trauma response.’

Laura adds: ‘There is a lot of misunderstanding around hoarding. Some people think they’re lazy, but [people who hoard] are clearly finding it difficult to let go of things emotionally; they don’t have the tools to deal with their emotions properly and it manifests in different ways; that’s what hoarding is.’

Laura and her team work with clients slowly and compassionately. The hardest cases she sees are the after-death cleans, where clients have died in their hoard, or lived out their twilight years in an unsafe home.

She was recently called to the home of a woman who had dementia and hoarding disorder. ‘She was smoking and we found mice droppings in there. She was on her own with no assistance from anyone. If it weren’t for the estate agent that came to look at her property and asked us for help, she probably would have died in there.

Rachel’s spare room. ‘There is a lot of misunderstanding around hoarding,’ says Laura (picture supplied)

After the first cleaning session, Rachel began to clean with the team. (Picture: Supplied)

‘It was a fire hazard, she couldn’t walk around and she wasn’t eating properly. We found tinned food in there from 2007. That one stayed with me. It’s a hard job mentally; but it’s very rewarding to be helping people.’

When Laura and her team arrived at Rachel’s house, she hid upstairs as the cleaned. ‘I thought: “Are they going to judge me, laugh at me? What are they thinking of me?”’ she admits.

After the first cleaning session was finished, Rachel came downstairs, spoke to them and from there began to clean with the team.

‘To say Laura saved my life sounds really dramatic. But it does feel like that. She was absolutely brilliant and so knowledgeable about the mental health side of things. Because it was my secret shame. “What grown up lives like this?” I would ask myself.

‘When it was all done, I felt more at peace than I had felt in three years.’

Since then, Rachel has received counselling and now has a weekly housekeeper again. ’I’m aware that it would be all too easy to slide backwards; it could happen really easily if I don’t take care,’ she says.

Since the clean up she has had friends and family around and her cat is able to run around happily. She can also take part in those all-important self care rituals like lighting a scented candle – which Rachel hadn’t done for years – or having a hot bath.

‘I feel so much better now and so much more positive,’ she adds. ‘Being able to go back to work and knowing when I finish, I’m coming home to a safe, clean house makes a massive difference.’

*Rachel’s name has been changed.

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Extreme cleaner Laura set up her company to help those suffering from hoarding disorder.