At least somebody’s cleaning up in the foreclosure debacle

By Brendan Buhler

Thursday, June 12, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The house at 7927 W. Constantinople Ave. may be a foreclosure but it is not empty, because of all the trash, and it is not uninhabited, because of the smell.

It greets you at the door, climbs up your nose and tries to escape through your eye sockets.

The first time he met the odor, Mike Schoenbaechler fled. Then, courage and stomach braced, he went back in.

Mike is a junk hauler, and his hands were full at 7927 W. Constantinople Ave., which didn’t look all that different from its stucco siblings. A few boarded-up windows and a dead lawn, sure, but not that different.

But outsides can be deceiving. Sometimes foreclosed homes are trashed by evicted occupants out of anger or despair. Other times — as at 7927 — the occupants are slobs of the highest order.

The bank called Mike and his 1-800-GOT-JUNK partner, Tom Delaney, to clean up the mess.

Mike and Tom cleaned out five foreclosures over the weekend alone. And the week hadn’t even started. The foreclosure cleanup business is booming.

Or, in the case of 7927 W. Constantinople, ripening.

“Cats and dogs, Tom. Cats and dogs,” Mike says, putting a shovel to the ankle-high trash in the living room.

Tom, adjusting his Vicks VapoRub-smeared dust mask, doesn’t need to be told.

Even with five guys, it will take more than a day to get through 7927, a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath, two-story house on a neat suburban street in the northwest that has been empty and steeping in stink for six months.

(A neighbor, who didn’t want to give his name, said 7927 used to belong to the president of the homeowners association.)

Reaching deep into the pile, Mike pulls out a plastic box. “Hey, here’s a fire safe, Tom. This must be where the gold bars are.” Same line every time.

It’s locked.

Besides all the piles and clumps and mounds that say “cat,” there are boxes of unopened food, boxes of opened food, bottles, pillows, empty DVD cases, hair spray cans, broken stereos, a wrestling board game, plastic plants, cigarette butts, a broken fax machine, an ironing board and a broken bong repaired with a soda bottle and packing tape.

“You look at each of these rooms and you think, ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ ” Tom says. “One bite at a time.”

Mike, who is quite tall, and Tom, who is not, have been friends for 15 years. In January of last year, they opened a 1-800-GOT-JUNK franchise. Initially, they did lots of remodeling pickups, but now foreclosures are a growing part of the business.

Each house, though similar to the others in sadness, is always a little different. And shoveling through the rubble of someone’s life, you can’t help but develop little theories. Tom calls it JSI: Junk Scene Investigation.

The only guarantee is that there will always be old Christmas decorations left behind.

At 7927, there are Christmas decorations and bills. Unopened bills.

There are baseball and football trophies, too, more than a dozen. “I’m thinking of taking all these trophies and putting my name on them,” says Tom. “People will say, ‘2002 All-American Little League — but how did you ..?’ I’ll say, ‘That’s not important. I dominated.’ ”

(The neighbor says all the sons were good at sports and the parents helped run the youth leagues. But that was before the divorce.)

Tom comes panting out of the downstairs bathroom, where he had been scraping the floor hard with a shovel.

“Cats. I hate cats,” he says, gasping and gagging. “It was all crusted, stuck, just ...” he trails off. Tom is allergic to cats.

Two workers arrive from another job to lend a hand here. They look around and curse.

In the master bedroom, a bare rectangle on the carpet shows where the mattress and box spring had been. The rest of the floor is covered with more of the usual junk and, somewhere, a chirping smoke alarm. A small employee parking sign lies on a bathroom counter, altered to say “Pothead Parking Only.”

(The neighbor says the dad moved out. Eventually the mother moved to her boyfriend’s place, and the younger kids moved out, too. The oldest daughter, who was almost 20, stayed behind. Her boyfriend moved in. They were supposed to make payments to Mom. But, well, there were “a lot of drugs, a lot of drugs.” Eventually the bank took the house.)

From one of the kids’ rooms there’s a crash, some clattering and a lot of tinkling noises.

“Yahtzee!” cries Tom.

In these rooms, the trash is hip-deep or higher. When you stick a shovel into it, watch out.

The guys haul trash can after trash can out to their trucks. Each truck holds 15 cubic yards, which is between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds of mixed junk. The house at 7927 fills up two and a half dump trucks, not counting the carpet.

They’ll have to come back another day for the rest of the carpet.

From one of the truck beds comes the occasional strangled chirp of a smoke alarm.

Mike, Tom and the other fellows pack up their shovels, rakes, push brooms, sledge hammers, pry bars, saws and bolt cutters.

But there’s one last thing. That fire safe.

Tom asks for suggestions for the combination.

777? 666? 123?

“Try 420,” one of the workers says.

“There were some druggies in here,” another guy acknowledges.

“Click.”

Nothing but empty baggies.