Urban Spelunking

I walked through the Accidental Duplex recently. Well, crawled and climbed through in spots would be a more accurate description. My dad was in town and wanted to see the inside, partly because he's intrigued by the whole thing and partly because he's convinced their is a suitcase full of abandoned drug money hidden inside (more on that later).

The last time I had been inside I had managed to make my way into the kitchen. I choose not to go much farther because there was a large, overturned love seat in my way and I was alone. That didn't even slow my dad down when he got that far. So much for senior citizen stereotype. We crawled past the rest of the junk in the kitchen and found fire damage, lots of of it. Looks like an intense fire had burned through this side of the building by the kitchen, bathroom and stairway.

The next easiest path was to the basement, which also suffered from fire damage. There was also a lot of stuff down there. Go to the other side of the basement and the fire damage disappears. It turns out the side of the duplex furthest from the back door dodged most of the fire damage. However, both sides are about equally full of junk. The fire side of the duplex has stuff thrown all over it. The other side has it mostly stacked.

Most of the stuff is on the first and basement floors. It begins to clear out in the second and third floors. Those floors have a lot of stuff in them in spots, but they also have empty rooms. Someone had even tried to sweep the floor in one of the rooms. Getting up to these floors is a little bit of a trip. Two of the staircases are badly damaged. One up to the second floor is passable, but just barely. The other leading up to the third floor is non-existent. Luckily there are mirror staircases on the other sides that are solid.

The third floor has a room and a half each and big hole that should have a door in it that leads to the back flat roof. When we got out there you could see for a while. The flat roof is pretty solid. The peaked roof was in the middle of a reshingling before the previous owner stopped. Some of the architectural shingles were nicely laid. The rest of it is either tar paper or cheaper rolling shingle material on it.

Getting from the basement to the penthouse and back again was tough because of the fire damage, but the real challenge came from all the junk everywhere. Here are some of the highlights we found: old Troy Athens HS computers, numerous cases of carpet detergent, skis, plastic flowers, a Nordic Trac, fire damage, a crash helmet, intact fine china, an old Army trunk and a gymnastic balance beam. However, we did not find a suitcase full of drug money. My dad remains hopeful.

Hoarders Paradise

Ever watch the TV show "Hoarders" and think, 'Thank God, I don't live like that. How do people get to that point?' Or worse yet you see it and realize, 'OMG, that's the old lady across the street' or your grandparents or the house you grew up in. Well, I opened up the Accidental Duplex and quickly realized that house is now my house.

From the outside, it appears the easiest point of entry to the Accidental Duplex is through the backdoor. Well, don't judge this duplex by its exterior. I was only able to open it about three inches at first because it was so full of junk. A lowered shoulder and a sucked-in gut allowed me to get in enough to actually open the door. This is what I found:



Getting that far, to where you can physically stand in the house or at least its back porch, took more than an hour. I came back another afternoon and started to really dig into the back porch of crap. Maybe it all of this stuff was just concentrated toward the end of the house? At the end of Day 2, it became obvious the answer was no. I was able to get into the kitchen, which was filled with even more crap than the back porch. Much more crap. After about four hours I was able to move enough stuff around and take enough stuff out I could get about six feet inside the kitchen. From there I could see farther into the Accidental Duplex and there was even more crap everywhere. However, to trail blaze that far into the structure I had to take this out of it.



Among the items in there were milk crates filled with old keyboards (think Apple II), a rolling cooler, bottles of new Sierra-brand anti-freeze, a police tricycle for kids and commercial-grade garbage bags. The latter of that really came in handy. So three huge garbage bags later I was able to put a lot of back inside and still be able to walk through it and lock the door.