Reply #20: They revisited him a few weeks later and he had kept it clean

[Lorien]

I think the good thing about going "public" with the problem is that his friends and clients will encourage him to keep it tidy. Sometimes situations like that just become a vicious cycle; the house gets too messy and then a person feels overwhelmed that it's too much to deal with, so it gets messier...the person gets even more overwhelmed, so it gets messier-until at last the person feels so hopeless about it that they become depressed and just give up on any attempts at cleaning. Having someone else attack the problem might be just the fresh start they needed to break the cycle.