GRANITE FALLS, Wash. — As she scrubs the walls of a friend's Granite Falls home, Jackie Wardlow asks herself, "How do you get 10-year-old grease off a wall?"
Wardlow needs a lot more than elbow grease to take on the situation she is currently confronted with.
"I was horrified," she said. "The conditions were deplorable."
Just before Christmas, Clay Mendenhall went into the hospital for a broken shoulder.
He asked Wardlow, his longtime friend, to look after his dog.
"If he hadn't asked me to look after Ozzie, none of this would've happened," Wardlow said.
What she discovered inside the home brought her to tears.
"After seeing his place, every morning I'd just sit there and cry because I let my friend sit here at his own demise and I didn't even notice," Wardlow said.
Once Wardlow got past the front door, that demise was evident.
"There were spiders everywhere," said neighbor Phyllis Arnold. "The smell was atrocious."
Maggots squirmed in the overflowing kitchen sink. The refrigerator was filled with rotting food. The cupboards were filled with jars of food so past the expiration dates that they actually exploded.
The furnace hadn't worked for two years and there had been no hot water since May.
Since discovering the situation the day after Christmas, Wardlow and her team of friends have been working every single day to get the place livable for Mendenhall.
Their work is having ripple effects throughout the small town.
Braedon Berg, 14, spent his entire winter break helping clean the place up.
"I feel sorry for the guy," he said. "I think community is very important. Young people like me should be doing a lot more for the community. It would definitely make Granite Falls a better place."
For his part, Mendenhall worked for the Seattle Parks Department for 30 years.
He said he's not sure how things got so out of hand in the house he has lived in for 20 years.
"I didn't have the money to fix things up," he said. "I have space heaters that keep the place pretty warm and I just take a very fast shower with the cold water."
Mendenhall said is humbled by his neighbors' efforts.
"They're doing a very good job and I didn't expect this to happen. I did not expect this to happen at all."
For now, the cleanup continues.
Donations are coming in -- including a new bed -- and plans are underway to have the house finished by Mendenhall's 66th birthday at the end of the month.
As she continues scrubbing doors and walls, Wardlow simply hopes this story will remind everyone to go beneath surface level when checking on people they care for.
"Even though your friends, your family, your loved ones say they're ok, behind closed doors you have no idea what's really going on."