What Is Disaster Masters?

On the company's website Disposophobia.com, you can see amazing photographs of homes that Disaster Masters has cleaned up. There are before and after photos, displayed in such a way that you can see one turning into the other. In the "before" photos, rooms are filled with junk that covers the entire floor and often the furniture as well. It looks as if there had been a flood, except that instead of pools of water, there are pools of junk several feet deep that have settled into the rooms. In one especially shocking picture, the junk rises all the way to the ceiling. In the "after" photos, the rooms look normal. They're not overly sterile or artificial looking, just ordinary, attractive, uncluttered, normal, livable rooms. Seeing the transformation is fascinating.

The company has been around for a long time. Ron Alford, the Managing Director of Disaster Masters, says, "Disaster Masters was invented in 1980. And we were doing this for five years before Disaster Masters under the name of Service King here in New York." Alford describes how the decluttering process works, "People who think they might be compulsive hoarders or who live with a compulsive hoarder will call us, and we'll do an appraisal. Kind of like a doctor or a plastic surgeon. And then we go and look at their clutter, put together a recovery plan, and charge a flat fee to bring the house back to a habitable condition."

"There are basically three phases of restoration," Alford says, "The first is to separate the wheat from that chaff - the good stuff and the bad stuff. What is left goes into phase two where we go through what's left and decide what to keep. And then ultimately some people just want to go full blown, and they redecorate completely. So, they take a chronically disorganized home and go from 'habitable' to 'hurrah'."

Disaster Masters is located in New York, but can work with people anywhere in the country. Alford says, "With Disaster Masters, how we help depends on where the hoarder lives. If they're anywhere within 150 miles of New York City, we will make an appointment to go and see them, just like a doctor. They can't bring their home to us, so we have to go to them and we charge a fee that is appropriate depending on the nature of the problem and where it is physically located. We also work around the United States. People call us and we work with them remotely. We have every kind of communication device - phones, faxes, video conferencing - so people with a web camera, can actually take a web camera and turn it on and walk through the house and give me a bird's eye view of exactly what it looks like."

In addition to rescuing junk-filled apartments, the staff of Disaster Masters can also work with the compulsive hoarders themselves, if they are willing to learn how to change their hoarding behavior. "Some chronically disorganized clients are being forced to do this under stress," Alford says, "And they don't want to learn, so there is nothing we can do about that. That's like trying to herd cats. You can't force change. But the company does coach compulsive hoarders who want to learn and train them to take much better care of themselves. We have better than a sixty-percent recovery rate. And we have NO books. We don't believe in clutter management books, lessons, or tips for compulsive hoarders. It's one-on-one and each hoarder's condition is treated individually. Books don't help. Books are loaded with all kinds of tips, but the thing is that with compulsive hoarding, there needs to be a 'click' in the hoarder's mind. They need to realize that the root of their problem is basically laziness. That, in my opinion, is a big part of the reason people become compulsive hoarders. But there is a different reason for each hoarder, and there is also a different recovery strategy."