Hoarder forced to sleep in car after filling £500k home with newspapers

A hoarder filled up his £500,000 home with so many newspapers he was forced to sleep in his car.

Cleaner Joe Cole claimed, who was tasked with clearing the mess, said he had never seen anything like it.

The 43-year-old and four of his workers spent an hour breaking down a barricade of newspapers by the front door of the three-bed detached home near Brighton, East Sussex.

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Some 5,000 newspapers had jammed the door shut, and door frames were almost completely blocked with piles of the paper waste.

A toilet door appears was also jammed open by more local and national newspapers that littered the floor while the kitchen was also completely awash with the periodicals.

The cleaners said that the clutter presented a very dangerous fire hazard and said the man was lucky he didn't get trapped inside his own home.

The hoarder, whose identity is being protected, was eventually forced to stay in his car, as there was no room left for him to sleep.

Joe says he filled a 3.5tonne van with 'more than 5,000 newspapers' which cost over £1,000 to dispose of, and yet he's convinced the homeowner has already started collecting papers again.

He posted images taken inside the house in May 2021 on TikTok last year, which has since been viewed tens of thousands of times.

"I've never seen anything like that in my life," he said.

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"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.

"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.

"We told him to start recycling his newspapers but he's 100% started again."

It took Joe and his team over a week to clear the house but he believes it won't be the last time he's called to the property for a cleanup job.

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".

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