A hoarder was forced to sleep in his car after packing his half-million-pound house with so many newspapers he couldn't get inside.
Professional cleaner Joe Cole said that it was impossible to enter the front door when his clearance company JGD Pro Solutions came to clear the home with "more than 5,000" newspapers in the building.
Mr Cole said he and four other workers spent an hour unblocking the front door of the three-bed detached home near Brighton.
Images showed newspapers piled 6ft high in places in the house, including one of the bedrooms.
A toilet door appeared 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 believed 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 said he filled a 3.5-tonne van with the papers and spent a whopping £1,000 disposing of them.
He posted images taken inside the house in May 2021 on TikTok and they've 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% started again."
Despite trying to convince the man to recycle his newspapers, he said 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".
