Housemates

[clickers123]

AIBU to ask you all your worst and best housemate stories! I'm preparing some of my year 13 students for university and college where they will be living away from home (different countries) and want to go through some scenarios with them.
Thank you!

Don't you have one of your own to start it off?

When i was a student i unfortunately found myself sharing with a two student journalists. They were always making things up and contriving bizarre pretexts for very specific conversations. The worst bit was when the two of them got chatting to each other, neither of them had anything useful or interesting to share but kept trying to get the other one to say something interesting and truly it was so tedious witnessing their zero entropy race to the bottom.

OP is going to be relating the stories to her students so doesn't particularly need to have one for us.

*Relaying

I have lots but it sounded like article fishing to me.

Just remind them that at some point they will probably live with someone who they will come to loathe so much that everything they do will be annoying and your students will become convinced that their housemates are doing these annoying things as a personal attack.

And then remind them that there's a very good chance that at some point they will have a housemate who feels that way about them.

Worst parts - One housemate was in charge of collecting and paying the council tax (mixed student/professional house). She 'forgot' for several months, hid reminder letters and we all ended up with a court summons. Turns out she had spent the money after getting into financial problems. She ended up having to move home to her parents.

One housemate was very into the clubbing scene and used to bring people home at 4am to continue the party. Wouldn't stop even though the entire house asked him to as he 'pays the same rent as everyone else'. Landlord ended up having to get involved after several complaints to the police from neighbours.

All the normal arguments - housemates not pulling their weight with cleaning, 'borrowing' food and not replacing etc etc.

Best parts - a ready made friendship group + there was always someone around to hang out with or do things with. Very social and makes it easy to make friends in a new city. Massively increased social circle, especially if you share with people who aren't doing your course. Probably the cheapest way to live (as long as they don't spend your bill money!). I'm still good friends with most of my old uni housemates - it wouldn't have been the same without them!

The short version of worst housemates:
The one who collected the rent from all of us each week and paid it. Except he didn't. He spent it on drugs, booze, food and "his" share of the utilities. He also lost his job, stopped attending Uni, and used his free time to intercept all mail and messages from the landlord. He up and left one Wednesday, and we all found out on the Friday that we were being evicted and locks changed on the Monday.

I had a dysfunctional house share where everyone took their separate toilet roll to the toilet with them, and there were 4 separate washing up liquid bottles by the sink. Please learn to share the basics together

My last houseshare I lived with a girl who kept leaving shit down the toilet and when I pulled her up on it she said "I had a 9am train to catch"... except that's not an excuse and she had a train to catch that day ONLY, with nowhere to be every other fucking day she did it... Gross.

The houseshare before that, the one and only thing I got them to agree before we moved in together was that they don't move their boyfriends in. They agreed, lied and essentially forced me out as I had a meltdown. Found a replacement, the replacement left after a month so they fucking harrassed me for their rent after I had moved elsewhere!!! It went to court and everything. Two faced cunts.

I mean THEY found a replacement. I was looking obviously but they took it out of my hands as they knew someone. So it was a massive slap in the face the way they behaved. Most stressful year of my life this past year.

Medea13

I'm not article fishing. I'm lesson planning.

@Medea13

I was in a house share with 2 other girls.
One of them got a new boyfriend & decided to move in with him before the tenancy was up (there was 2 month left) but said she'd continue to pay her portion of the rent as she was legally obliged to; fair enough.

What she didn't tell us was that in order to continue paying the rent, she had sub-let her room cash-in-hand to an unknown (& very pervy) 40+ yr old bloke (we were 19yr old students at the time).

We came home on the first day after she'd left to find him sat in our lounge.
She was most upset (after he told us who he was) that we demanded she pay him back and kick him out.

It took a while but after threats of us calling the police about the stranger in our house, he finally left.

Thankfully we'd come home with a group of friends as if I'd come back on my own it would have been incredibly frightening.

Over the course of the next week or so, both my housemate and I discovered that several pair of our knickers were missing, presumably taken by the perve 😝

My second year, I moved in with a couple who bickered a lot.
The main tv in the lounge was owned by the boy, and when he and his girlfriend were arguing, he would say “you can’t watch MY tv”, snatch the remote and turn it off. She would turn it on, he would turn it off and so on.
And if anyone cooked anything except steak, he would peer at it and say “urgh, stew”.

Drove me crazy.

That you to those who answered in a genuine and non~cynical manner! I'm going to present some scenarios to the students and get them to role play solutions. I have plenty of stories (maggot infestation, anyone?), believe me, but I'm a bit out of date. Keep them coming and thank you so much!

New housemate went out to celebrate moving in, pulled a random bloke. In the early hours he wandered into someone else’s room and peed on their stereo, when the occupier of this room woke up he was suddenly embarrassed by his nakedness, grabbed one of her dresses and threw it on to cover himself up.

Happy days.

One house in my PGCE, with three others. One of them hid all the crockery and cutlery in October half term as she didn’t want any of us using them when we returned.
I moved out and into an emergency house on campus. Only space left and was with three Spanish girls who preferred to only communicate between themselves in Spanish.

Shared with a couple. Regularly came home to find him shagging his ex (who'd bought their toddler to see him). Toddler usually asleep on sitting room floor. They regularly stole all my food knowing I was really struggling on minimum wage, then got arsey when I gave that as reason I was leaving.

Then there was a guy whose walls were covered in hardcore porn(he never shut his door) who just walked into my room without knocking for made up reasons all the time. He then told me he had spare keys to all our rooms "in case of emergency, for the LL". I moved.

Flatmate got wasted & decided to shower. He threw up so violently that he blocked the shower, passed out and flooded the downstairs. We had to pull him out of his vomit shower, clean him up and put him to bed.

In a separate house, the following year, I cleaned out the disgusting fridge with food 6 months + out of date. I returned everything but left the veg drawer soaking in the sink with bleach as it was that bad & I needed go catch a train home. When I got back, every piece of my crockery and cutlery was used and dirty. When I asked why, I was told not to leave my dirty fridge drawer out.

A little different to the ones posted, but -

Houseshare of up to five people. Room spare, landlord moves his 20 something relative in. Relative acts a little... Odd. Announcing to the housemates what food he has bought, complaining of people banging on his door at night, starts putting the deadlock on that front door at 9pm (so anyone else not home is locked out) eventually housemates realise he's been damaging the speaker cables/phone cables/Internet cables 'because people are listening'.

Another time, moved into a houseshare and kept coming home to find my things had been moved. After a while realised that long term housemate war really good friends with the landlady who he saw as a mother figure, and who he invited to 'pop in' whenever she saw fit. So she used to do so and would tidy up/rearrange the house as she liked, including binning personal possessions she didn't agree with and going in our rooms and rearranging stuff.

Also won't forget the housemate in a large houseshare who sold our furniture for crack money, or the trustafarian who arranged a houseparty for his friends birthday without telling anyone who lived in the house; this house party included an arts weekend where the house was advertised as a gallery space to anyone who wanted to visit (cue going for breakfast and finding a bunch of art students in the kitchen) and culminated in a party where some unknown roadies appeared and moved a sofa out the lounge and replaced it with a hired speaker stack and lots of people turned up to party who didn't know anyone who lived there and we're gobsmacked when they realised it was lived in (presuming it to be squat.or studio or similar)

Don't miss housesharing!

1st year... housemate who used to boil chicken feet on the hob for hours. She didn't clean her room for the entire year then broke the Hoover with her waist length hair that had gathered in mounds in her room and also flooded her shower in to my room next door...
2nd year... landlord was a cowboy who didn't fix the shower for 2 weeks after I was nearly electrocuted after the steam turned out to be a short circuit burning...eventually found another house share and the people moving into my room as well as the rest of the house were put out that I took all my own pots pans and plates with me as they didn't have their own..
3rd year...utter weirdo of a housemate who showered every night before bed but then kept us awake using hairdryer at 2am then got up at 7am and did the same (No boyfriend, don't know what she did in those five hours...) came home one day and she had gone out not before having taken her knickers off complete with dirty sanitary towel and left them on her bedroom floor with door open. When the house share ended as we were all moving out she was still packing whilst we cleaned the whole house and I let rip!

My flatmate flipped his mattress and found hardened poo smeared across it with plenty of stains.

Lived with a flatmate that only watched Friends repeats or Michael Jackson videos.

Lived with a chef who used to bring home dead pheasant and things to pluck and chop up in our open plan kitchen.

Flatmate’s friend drugged and raped me.

I had a few interesting housemates.

The one who once left a pair of dirty trousers on top of the fridge with dirty knickers and a used pad inside.

The one who chucked up on the doorstep at 2am and was too pissed to fix it. Sadly the postman beat us to the door in the morning! Same girl was also very messy & we'd only clean up after her so much. When her mum came to move her home, her mum snidely remarked as to why the kitchen looked like the before on Kim & Aggie (it didn't ), & it was pointed out to her that her slut of a daughter lived there.

Noisy 1st year halls mate we could hear shagging 2 floors away. Would have been less bad if she had sounded less like she was in pain!

Housemate who waited until the last moment to say she was pregnant & dropping out. She was the one with the parents who wanted to know if any of us had visiting boyfriends, not just their own daughter!!

Best friend lived with an interesting few, too.