“I could clean up body parts all day – it’s vomit that I struggle with,” Kellie admits. “I have no emotional attachment to the job, it’s just cleaning up a mess and I find it best not to think about what it actually is.”
As the family business grew, Kellie and Andrew expanded their team to include two of their kids Kyle and Alyssa, both 23, as well as friends and even one next-door neighbour.
The crew are on call any hour of the day to attend deaths, incidents in jail cells or at train stations, biological hazards and hoarder homes. No two clean-up jobs are the same and Kellie says they can go from mopping up human remains one day to rummaging through mountains of accumulated goods the next.
A crime scene typically takes four to six hours to clean, while a hoarder home can take anywhere from three to six weeks to scrub.
Although being on call 24/7, 365 days a year can be demanding, Kellie, says her family enjoy unwinding with a friendly game of softball every weekend.
“The conversation on the sidelines is always interesting because some people want to know all the gory details of our week and others don’t want to know at all,” she says with a laugh.
“So many people have said to me that they have never met a crime-scene cleaner, but we really are no different to them.”