Sometimes that messy group house has an excuse after all: For more than six weeks, a heap of trash sat out on a tony stretch of Q Street NW in Georgetown, and it wasn’t for a lack of trying by Camp Kilcollin, 25, and his two housemates. The saga began when construction started on a condo development next door to Kilcollin & Co. in November, blocking their normal trash-pickup location on East Place NW. Kilcollin then took the garbage across the street to join the neighbors’ trash, but a homeowner asked him to put it in front of his own house, on Q Street. There the trash festered for weeks, eventually growing to eight large bags plus what passers-by flung atop the pile. In mid-January, Kilcollin received a note from another neighbor directing him to move the heap behind his house. While he was moving the bags, yet another neighbor stopped him and told him to put the bags back on Q Street. “At this point, I was really frustrated,” says Kilcollin. “It was a Friday afternoon, I smelled like trash, and I’m thinking, I still have four more bags to move.” The neighbor told Kilcollin to call the city, and he scheduled a pickup. Before that happened, though, the condo developer, Tom Barringer, had hauled some of the trash away in late January—because, he says, he felt sorry for the guys: “Whatever we can do to help, we will.” —Huan Hsu