What's the weirdest house rule you've ever experienced as a house guest?

[Creativemode]

Just that really.

Mine is someone that wouldn't let me flush the toilet incase it woke their children.

Also another wouldn't let me go upstairs to the toilet incase the stairs creaked and woke their children (there was no downstairs toilet).

I had a school friend that wasn't allowed fish and chips in the house because of the smell.

I briefly had lodgings before DH and I were married - she was happy for DH to visit (about 50 miles away)

He came to stay for the weekend, drove her to the shops (no car) and then we went to a later movie than planned so we could drop her off on her night out

Next day she had a massive go at me because DH had walked through the living room (you had to, to get to bathroom/kitchen) and apparently he was only allowed in my room ( and as a taxi) and not to use the bathroom or kitchen or living room???

She used to moan I basically wasn't away every weekend, not sure what I was paying for.

I want to ban Jaffa cakes from my house too now.....

My major gripe with the no flush unless you poo was you had to announce! In front of lots of distant relatives. "Poo or pee?" they'd yell over the coffee table. If you said pee, they'd ask who else so they'd all go. If you said poo, all the pees go first, poo last to flush. My aunt does not eat before or during a visit for embarrassment. I always say pee then "accidentally" flush. I'd not visit otherwise.

enolagay between you and the burning of sanitary towels at a house I think you both win!!

I stayed in a hostel once with some really weird rules:

1. This was the most important rule, we were told. Don't be naked ANYWHERE. How we were supposed to shower I don't know, but the bathrooms were too grimy for me to even think of breaking the rule

2. Don't fully shut the bathroom door in case the cats want to come in or out.

3. Leave all windows open at night so that the cats can come in and out of the windows as they please.

The next day, when it came to paying up, the owner had dissapeared. Rumour had it that he had driven somewhere to pick up some drugs. We left pretty quick and never came back...

At my parents - there is a secret knock, they genuinely won't answer the door until you have completed the secret knock, even though it is very long and they have CCTV everywhere so can bloody well see who it is.

You have to pray an entire decade of the rosary with them after every meal.

You are not allowed to talk in the living room, ever.

There is an ever increasing list of banned subjects and words. Sometimes as a teenager I would play banned word bingo, the prize was being made to sleep in the caravan in the garden (which was much easier to sneak out from) I am very good at banned word bingo.

Even as an adult I am not allowed to take cigarettes into their house. There is a special box in the garden for me to leave them in, I then have to make sure the neighbours don't see me smoking (even though the neighbours smoke)

Mil wouldn't allow anyone to use the only loo in the house after 9pm when she had retired to bed.
Each of her sons had a bucket or waste paper bin to toilet in and they were grown men.
Two weeks after having our first baby we went to stay and even though I was bleeding heavily and using night pads I was not allowed to use the loo.
I had to sit on a bucket in the downstairs room we had been allocated as a bedroom and told that " if I really had to wash my hands then use the washing up bowl ". I never stayed there again.

I want to come to your house JellyBelli!

Eggy 'Leave a message'?! Ffs, some people eh?! I hope the 'message' was stinky and horrible and stunk her house out forever

People can be very very strange creatures.

My nan would only watch bbc1. Tv was on from 7am to 10.30pm everyday but only bbc1

"Doing his homework" for a poo?

What happens when he is constipated? Does he say he can't do his homework.

Oh dear.

When I was a teenager my friend's dad said that sanitary towels should be burned in the living room fire.

My mum also made me do this in the Sixties, although I wasn't supposed to do it in front of my dad.

Can't remember what happened in summer; I think she must have lit a fire specially, because they never went in the bin.

I do aloof that except the stuff on the salad cream. Da man I thought it was normal.

Golf club whack on the sofa to evict spiders gets my winning vote.

My weak contribution is: I visited a friend & her parents for an evening meal. The lady of the house strongly insisted that I pour myself the wine first. I must have smelt a rat. I poured wine for the 2 people closest to me, then for myself, then put the wine back in the table centre for others.

Apparently this wine thing was a mind game test!! I was suppose to refuse & hand it back without having any, else be deemed very rude. Friend's mom did this test all the time to guests.

Blooming autocorrect , I do all that will my table, thought it was normal.

Repressed memory time.

Not a house, but Guide camp in the 1990s. We did the kind of camping where you have a field and a tap, so waste was to be kept to a minimum. They burned the sanitary products in an official incinerator old bin with holes in the sides.

Only bits would kind of fly out of the holes in the sides.

Which would be fine if they had always put the lids on the pans nearby.

At least once during the week's camp we would have what we girls affectionately referred to as "sanitary towel stew".

I. Can't. Even.

There is another reason for not flushing the loo.
If you live in a flat, it is likely to then waken the neighbourgs underneath (or next door). I have been living in places like this and it has stayed with me TBH.
Add to that two dcs who wouold wake up in the early hours if your flush the loo and it is now an ingrained habit.

I don't ask people to do so though but I'm quite happy to see that other people do the same thing

When we visited my Nan's house we always had to leave by the door in which we entered. It was to make sure we took our bad luck with us...

My mum (still) won't let anyone turn on a light without drawing the curtains first ('because people will see in'). Fair enough, but you try reading indoors on a dull winter's day without any form of lighting, just because some neighbours might be standing on their dressing tables in the hope of catching a glimpse of your formica.

And bedroom curtains literally cannot be drawn, because all the curtain rods have fallen off the walls...

Family member in her thirties has a lot of rules, I no longer visit her.

No shoes anywhere in the house.

Guests are not allowed sit on any furniture unless they are staying overnight in which case they're allocated a space on the couch which is covered by a bath towel.

If you have your period and are staying overnight, you must tell her so she can bring a patio chair into the sitting room, instead of having you sit on the couch. A dark-coloured bath towel is placed on the patio chair.

No flushing after 9pm (large, three storey modern property with perfectly quiet plumbing)

Any tv ads for sanitary products must be switched off IMMEDIATELY lest her (34 year old) husband see them and get embarrassed.

Any food with crumbs must be eaten over the sink.

No take-away foods of any type allowed in the house.

Visitors are not allowed bring in any unhealthy food- this includes any type of dairy product or anything that contains gluten (nobody in the house is coeliac).

There are no bins in the house. If you need to throw out as much as a teabag, you must pop it in a suitable receptacle and immediately bring it to the wheelie bin at the bottom of the garden.
You are not allowed accumulate waste for a trip to the bin.

Guests must bring their own towels. These must be white.

I could go on...

I just love this thread.... Sanitary towel stew!!!

You see, I don't think the no dogs in the house rule is particularly strange. I like dogs but I don't think they belong in houses.

What strikes me about some of these is not that they are weird but that they seem designed to cause discomfort or embarrassment. Which is awful.

I used to know a boy who wasn't ever allowed to touch the walls in his house. I think they'd redecorated but the result was that I was convinced they were about to shout at me if I even so much as brushed the walls.

I wonder whether people find my rules weird? I have a no unaccompanied children on the driveway rule (because we have a perfectly good garden and I live in fear of one running out into the road and getting knocked over).

I think whacking the sofa to get rid of spiders is sensible (the PP mentioned they were African grandparents - I assume this was in Africa).

at the white towels. I don't know why, but that straw made me gasp. I actually want to hear more, JustHere.

Don't touch the walls .... After being told that all I wanted to do was touch the bloody walls

We don't flush at night, either, if you've just had a wee, and I've never known anyone else doing it when I've stayed at their's!