A hoarder filled his half-a-million-pound home with so many newspapers that he could no longer get in it - so was forced to sleep in his car instead. Professional cleaner Joe Cole claimed he's 'never seen anything like it' after he and staff at his clearance company JGD Pro Solutions were tasked to deal with the towering mess.
The 43-year-old and four of his workers spent an hour unblocking the front door at the three-bed detached home near Brighton, East Sussex, as 5,000 newspapers had jammed it shut. Shocking images of their findings show door frames almost completely blocked with piles of the paper waste.
One shows bags of newspapers packed around 6ft high in one of the bedrooms making it impossible to get inside. A toilet door appears to be jammed open by more local and national newspapers that litter the floor while they fill the entire width of the kitchen too.
Joe believes the mess was causing a serious fire hazard and the man was lucky he didn't get trapped inside his own home. He's since claimed the hoarder, whose identity is being protected, had been sleeping in his car on the driveway because he couldn't move around the home anymore.
Joe says he filled a 3.5-tonne van with 'more than 5,000 newspapers' and spent a whopping £1,000 disposing of them. The professional cleaner posted images taken inside the house in May 2021 on TikTok last year [August] and it's since been viewed more than 35,000 times.
Joe said: "I've never seen anything like that in my life. Every bit of space in there had newspapers in it. The bathroom, kitchen, dining room, living room. It was all different papers.
"There were so many that they'd fallen down and blocked his front door, so he couldn't even get into the house. They were three quarters up the wall. His house was worth half a million but he slept in his banger of a car on the driveway.
"He's lucky he didn't get trapped inside. The electrics weren't great as well so it could have caused a fire. It's quite dangerous. I've never seen something built up so much in the house. We couldn't get our heads around what it was about newspapers. We told him to start recycling his newspapers but he's 100 per cent started again."
It took Joe a week to clear the house but he believes he'll be called back to the home in future to repeat the job. Despite trying to convince the man to recycle his newspapers he says he returned a few months later to find he'd started hoarding them again.
Joe says the man had also collected 300 pairs of socks and when asked why he simply said 'you can never have too many socks'.
