To ask you about your worst flat sharing stories?

[MonaLisaDoesntSmile]

I had in the past lived in flat/house shares for quite a few years.
My worst by far was a girl I was in halls of residence during my postgrad year at uni. It was a 5 room flat in a big halls building, and the room right next to mine was occupied by a girl whose boyfriend lived on the same floor (flats were not mixed sex, so they could not live in the same flat).
For whatever reason, they never went to his flat for anything, but kind of lived in ours, both of them. They were both extremely loud and expressive, talked like if they were shouting. Also leading an owl lifestyle, they would eat late and stay up until early hours of the morning, hangind around between her room and the kitchen, banging the door every time they entered/left the room making my whole wall shake. She didnt have to wake up until 10/11 am, so had plenty of sleep.There were no earplugs that could cancel the noise and vibrations, and I had to also hear the alarm clock in the morning. My degree was super intense and I had to be up every morning very early, and worked until late and the whole year I hardly could get any sleep, it was so miserable I don't know how I actually made it through the year on 4 hours of sleep a night (if I was lucky).
Funnily enough when the exam session was on, she banged on my wall when I was skyping my family at 8PM as she 'had to study,' the only two weeks of peace I had between September and July. I spoke to her a few times, to no avail, she was actually louder out of spite.
The other girls in the flat did not experience that as none shared a wall with her, so they never got how stressful it was.
I had had great experience of living in halls up until then, but that year exhausted me.

@GammyLeg

I lived in a houseshare of six and one of them was a phantom shitter.

They would creep into someone’s room at night (generally at the weekend after everyone had had a big night) and poo on the carpet. So weird. There was much discussion and speculation and we decided that it was someone from another flat - our house was chaotic, with lots of people coming in and out). Eventually one of the housemates was caught red handed one night.

How were they caught, what happened? Did you suspect them?

Was it you?

This thread has all the hallmarks of an intern researching a DM online column

I thought I was the only person to find my toothbrush wet. In my case it was a housemate's freeloading girlfriend who thought it would be ok to borrow every day.

Other than her, we didnt really have much of a problem but then I mainly lived with boyfriend (who was abusive) and then my now DH, who does have tails of his student shares (rugby house where there was always a VHS on playing and it would either be Point Break or a porno - NICE NOT).

Not me, but a family member - he was woken up early one morning by a crash and a scream from upstairs, and went out of his room to find riot-gear clad, armed police all up both flights of stairs and in the landing above, having kicked in his housemate’s door to arrest him for murder.

Best bit - he’d stolen a knife (one of an IKEA set) from my family member, and he had to go to court and give evidence.

@Isitmeurlookingfor

This thread has all the hallmarks of an intern researching a DM online column

Maybe, bit all these stories could be fabricated, so they're a shit intern

I had a flatmate my first year of uni who used to go out drinking, cooking and come back at 2/3am then make smoothies in the kitchen. Which was right next to my bedroom.

I spoke to her multiple times with no success. In the end I took the fuse out of the blender.

She also cooked very spicy using my (cheap) pans but the flavour of whatever she cooked stained the pans which meant if I cooked something it tasted of her food.

He was very charming which was how he got the room, but I knew he was off the moment I met him. But the landlady wanted another tennant and wasn't living there, so it wasn't up to me.

He lied to the landlady about being a non-smoker.

Used to talk to me about the porn he'd watched.

Helped himself to my food.

Turned the heating off.

I suspected he was sleeping in my bed & worse when I was away.

I spent more time away on purpose and started sleeping with heavy furniture wedged against my bedroom door when I was home.

Landlady's friend was getting dirty phone calls which came from our landline. The itemised bill showed they were all made when he was home alone.

Landlady searched his room when he was out and found literally nothing in it. A few items of clothes but no other personal possessions.

She decided he had to go but was scared of him, so the plan to get him to leave was quite devious & complicated & involved fake eviction letters being sent to both of us, & me packing up my stuff even though I was secretly staying on.

The day he moved out she got the locks changed.

I think she had a serious failure of judgement when she met him. I think I had a lucky escape.

Had a flat mate once who pawned my tv. I had to speak to her mum and then send her to get it back. She used to “borrow” the other flat mates clothes and not look after them. Another flat mate (who has since died and no I didn’t kill her) was unbelievably tight (hard to get her to buy loo roll wash up liquid etc). It’s so frigging boring. She lived like a total pig too her bedroom was disgusting. When she moved out she left a load of shit in the shed which I binned a month later

DP's last flat share before moving in with me. Angry phone calls at 7am wanting to know why he'd used somebody's hairbrush as it was full of brown hair. DP's bald. The kitchen was unusable as every surface had cans, bottles and packaging welded to it with a thick layer of grease.

One turned out to be a heroin addict, so he had to lock his bedroom door every time he went to the toilet.

A new person moved into the living room and decided he wanted a bedroom, so DP caught him breaking into his room to chuck his stuff out (whilst addict hovered so he could 'take care' of the stuff that had a resale value).

DP decided 'fuck this' and gave notice on his room. As soon as the new person found out, he smashed his way in and threw DP's remaining stuff out of the window whilst he was at work and his mate had moved into the living room by 6pm. There was still three months left on the contract, so he thought 'bollocks', and got the landlord to agree to terminate his contract with immediate effect, rather than put them through the obligation to get the 'new' person in his room out, plus the new one in the living room, only for him to leave again immediately afterwards. Got it in writing, too, confirming he had no further legal or financial obligations in respect of the property.

Nine months later, he was getting hassled for money by them by phone & in the street as he walked past to go to work. Turns out that they had decided the electricity, gas, TV licence, broadband and council tax bills weren't their responsibility, they were DP's as he'd been the oldest person there by two years, so hadn't paid a penny since he'd moved out.

DP was registered for and paying council tax with me for the entire period they were claiming he hadn't paid. When he said 'No, I'm not living there' and provided evidence to the council and other creditors that he wasn't there and had been living with me, they went on a social media binge of claiming he'd stolen from them.

You can see the roof of the flat from my bathroom window. Just before he moved out, DP had noticed some tiles had fallen off and mentioned it to the others, but didn't tell the landlord that was probably why there was a large damp patch on the kitchen ceiling, as he just wanted his letter and out.

The kitchen ceiling collapsed a couple of months (and big storms) later. They didn't tell the landlord for another six weeks. And then claimed that DP was supposed to do it - when he'd officially moved out nearly a year before.

@Isitmeurlookingfor I wish, I could at least get money out of my mysery! I bet you were a detective in your past life.

An OCD flat mate who followed me about with a bottle of spray bleach; lads who started dealing from the flat (One time I wondered why they’d left a large slab of chocolate - think 400g dairy milk- on the coffee table, I took another look and realised it was cannabis resin.

Another where I came back after 2 weeks away to find the whole kitchen filled with bin bags... apparently the two girls who had stayed couldn’t empty the bins because that was a boy job - I am female!

The flat mate who repeatedly told my boyfriend he was too good for me and then stole my knives from the kitchen. I moved out after that but this woman physically attacked the next flat mate and the police had to be called.

I am happy to say I don’t have to share any longer!

In halls at university I ended up with 3 other girls, 2 were great the other didn't wear clothes in the flat and only ever got dressed when she went out. Now I don't mind nudity and sometimes I'll walk from my room to the shower with nothing on but when you have a full time nudist in the house its not a place you want to bring a boyfriend back to (she had a great body btw). Second year she couldn't understand why we didn't want to share with her again haha

Oh god, where to start?! The one who was very religious and fell in love with me and kept writing me love songs and singing them to me?
The one who was so lazy, never cleaned his cat litter tray out and then the cat would shit in MY room and he'd refuse to clean it up?
The one who came home at all hours off his head on drugs with loads of his thuggy friends in tow?
The one who became obsessive and followed me everywhere
All of them who never did any housework and hogged my pc all day.
The one who used to piss in vases and bottles and leave it for me to find?
Or the one who did (pic)?

First flat - was there for two years and then towards the end I discovered that one of the flatmates who handled the rent on behalf of us all was pilfering it for himself. I ended up £730 out of pocket and never got it back. I moved out.

Second flat - female turns out to be someone who I dubbed a Charismatic Liar by the end of my 4 years there. So many things I could mention but the worst was her lying about the bills and CT and over-charging all of us so she could pocket it for herself. I questioned her about it but somehow she managed to use her cutesy-pie charisma to turn the other 4 flatmates against me, but she paid me back a lump sum immediately so she was as guilty as hell. I later heard she paid out the others too but did a sob story on how it was all an innocent mistake. It absolutely wasn’t! (I had evidence).

I must have ‘mug’ stamped on my forehead when it comes to bills in a flat share! My advice to flatsharers is only pay rent directly to the landlord, and demand that all bills/CT are displayed are kept in a file for anyone to access so no one can lie, or be falsely accused, about bills.

Another three flat shares were absolutely fine, but in two of them each had a woman whose bedroom was the filthiest state I have ever seen. I had to accompany the gas engineer into one of them on one occasion and he visibly recoiled, and I put my shoes into the washing machine after that horrifying experience. So filthy - mountains of rubbish (we had to climb over and stand on it just to get to the radiator), unmade bed never had sheets and a disgusting-looking mattress, mouldy food and plates, dirty clothes and blood-stained knickers everywhere, dozens and dozens of bloodied tampon applicators strewn across the floor, the whole room has never ever been cleaned. It also turned out that she never washed her clothes and just put them back on again, which accounted for why she really smelt when standing anywhere near her. I think in hindsight something was definitely not quite right with her - she had a good job and went out most nights with friends, but I’d often come home and she’d down two bottles of wine watching tv and fall asleep blind drunk before staggering upstairs to her squalid room

I was so glad to buy our first home and leave flatshares behind.

I forgot about the one who fell asleep in the bath WITH IT RUNNING and flooded the whole house. Landlord was in middle of selling and there was no electricity or hot water and everything was sodden. He also ran up a huge bill on sex chatlines.

The first shared house I lived in, as a student, there was a postgrad woman student who would go out to the nearest bar and pick up a bloke, 3 or 4 nights a week and bring him home for the night. The rest of us were several years younger than her and it was . . . educational for us. This was student lodgings and not designed to mute the sound of random shagging. There was a shared kitchen and you never knew WHO she would have brought home who might be in there the next morning.

I once lived with an awful girl whilst at university. Some of the things she did included

1. Left piles of used sanitary towels and tampons on the bathroom floor instead of emptying the bathroom bin.
2. Had a pet mouse in a cage in the kitchen that she didn’t take care of and never cleaned out the cage. After not seeing it for a few weeks we queried it’s absence at it turned out it was dead she had just decided to leave it in there. We removed the mummified mouse and left the cage in her room.
3. Cooked a Sunday roast. Didn’t clean up after and left all the leftovers on the side. She came back to it in the Monday evening and ate all the food that had been sitting there in the summer heat for over 24 hours. She then spent the next 24 hours locked in our single toilet being violently ill.

When I left my ex-husband, I had a friend whose marriage was also ending and we agreed to move in together while we found our feet. Big mistake.

We found a house, agreed what furniture we'd each bring, who'd have which rooms, etc. I turned up and she'd put pictures on all the walls, spread her stuff through the house, and was turning over my furniture from the moving van saying 'this doesn't bring me joy ... or this ... well, we're not keeping this, ha ha!' Then she suggested I buy a new bookcase ... from Heals, for just shy of a grand.

The rest of the time I was there she treated me like the lodger and used the whole house just as she liked. She'd leave her dirty knickers hanging up crotch-outwards on the bathroom door when I had friends over/pluck her eyebrows over the sink and make a neat collection of hairs piled up by the basin. It was grim. And she used to sing (out of tune) opera loudly around the house when she got back from her morning run, around 7am on a weekend.

When I said I was moving out (at the end of the contract) she decided to stay on. I still had about three weeks on the contract, and one day when I was out she took all of my stuff out of the cupboards, smashed random bits of it, and piled it up in one room. 'Because I would hate for you to leave anything behind,' apparently.

Absolutely fucking nuts. And I say that as a veteran of house-shares and randomers who steal milk/walk around naked/whatever.

Oh I shared a house with a woman who walked around naked. But only when someone else had a boyfriend in.

@GammyLeg I third it. Need to know more about the pooing flat mate!
I also once heard water running that didn't sound like the tap and sneaked downstairs to see what housemate was doing. He had his back to me, trousers down, bum out. I said 'What the actual fuck, are you doing?!" And he turned around and I saw he had his penis in a vase , MY vase, peeing. He then proceeded to pour it down the sink.

I also lodged with a horrible woman. She basically thought I should never be there. I’d been away the first weekend I moved in and she assumed it would be true of every weekend. Thing was I was finishing a degree and needed to use the library at the weekend.
She also told me BF (now DH) was welcome to stay. He did one weekend. He did some DIY for her, bought her a takeaway and drove her into town to save her a taxi fare. After he left she lost her mind, apparently he should have not left my room at all, including to use the bathroom.
She constantly stole my food and toiletries. One day I washed up before work but had to leave a pan she had burnt soaking. She went fucking nuts that I hadn’t done her washing up (apart from fucking ever thing else).
So I said I was leaving- she went nuts again as she had plans for my rent. Basically she wanted me to just pay her and never be there.

I was in a shared house with Dave. Dave would wander around in a very short scabby towelling dressing gown and particularly enjoyed leaning over you in front of the tv to help himself to whatever you were eating. Irritating but also totally gross as he was naked underneath and the dressing gown would part to show you his horrible pale willy and scrotum at close quarters.

@HillyJilly All are grim, but the toilet one... yeah I would not be able to stomach that!

@MonaLisaDoesntSmile I also got up once to go for a pee in middle of night. Went back into bedroom, sat on my bed and could smell poo. Looking all over, frantic, blaming the dog.... turns out he had shat on the loo seat, I'd sat on it then poo went on my bed when I sat down...

My last flat share before I moved in with (now) DH was probably the worst. On viewing, it all seemed nice, the girls were lovely, and then when I moved in it was an utter shit tip.
The girl who had been in my room previously hadn’t cleaned before she left, it turned out the hoover was broken and the carpet was covered in hair. I had to go over it with strips of parcel tape as it was so disgusting and I couldn’t think what else to do. I also had to clean out the bathroom, the kitchen and the fridge before I put anything away. Nice enough girls but they were so filthy.
One of the girls spent all her time in her room and lived some sort of super healthy lifestyle - she liked to get up and blend things at 8am on a Sunday. I don’t miss being in a flat share.