HOUSTON -- Foreclosures in Harris County are up 16 percent this year, and warehouses are filling up with people’s confiscated belongings.

But some homeowners are fighting back.

It’s a notice you never want to get: a foreclosure. Just in Harris County, they’re coming at a thousand a month.

“A lot of them on adjustable rates,” Amanda Lecurex said.

The rates on adjustable mortgages have jumped, increasing monthly payments by hundreds of dollars.

This homeowner got behind on his and got a notice.

“January 1^st of this year that the house was going to be auctioned off,” he said.

In neighborhoods like this one in northwest Houston, spotting foreclosed homes is easy: The grass is high, the locks are gone and the warning signs are stuck to doors.

In dozens of cases a month, deputy constables have to evict people who’ve refused to give up their homes.

Their belongings are boxed-up, loaded-up and hauled off.

But where do they end up?

Just east of downtown, a warehouse is filling up with their washers, mattresses, sofas and fans, even their kids little bicycles and teddy bears.

“This is the end result of the eviction right here,” Precinct 5 Constable Capt. Dennis Kuthe said.

Capt. Kuthe said his office used to do about 10 foreclosure evictions a month, and now they’re doing 40.

“We’re not out here to destroy people’s lives,” he said. “It may seem so at times, but we’re not. It’s just a job.”

Does it have to be this way, with thousands of Houstonians losing their homes and sometimes their possessions? There is no easy way out of foreclosure, but some homeowners are keeping their houses and paying for them dearly.

“Do not trust the mortgage company whatsoever,” one homeowner said. He said at first,  he tried to work with his mortgage company.

“I said, ‘can we refinance at a standard rate?’” he recalled.

It’s what we were told you should do.

“Talk to your lender, the lender generally wants to talk to you,” Lecureux said. “They’d like to negotiate.”

But be careful, bankruptcy lawyer Kenneth Keeling said.

“It is so frustrating to talk to somebody who says, ‘well, they said they were working with me. I didn’t think they were just going to go ahead and do it,’” Keeling said.

That’s what our homeowner said happened to him, but then he still got a foreclosure notice.

So he fought back, hiring an attorney who had him declared bankrupt.

Now, he’s paying back everything on a new schedule. But not only has his monthly house payment doubled, his now-damaged credit score is giving him a financial beating.

“You know my house insurance went from $900 a year to $18 a year because of the credit,” he said. “The car insurance — everything has gone up because of the credit.”

It’s bad, but he has managed to keep his house at time when more and more Houstonians are losing theirs.

As for the belongings in the warehouse: The owners have 30 days to claim them by paying the moving and storage expenses.

If they don’t, the items are sold at auction.