Living with Roommates - Page 2

Been living on my own since 16; most of that time has been in sharehouses. Huge culture of it here in Oz.Check out He Died With a Felafel in his hand, book or film, for a reasonably accurate depiction of what it's like.
Some of the best times I've ever had were in sharehouse...good easily outweighs the bad.
Re: Bills. If you can get away with having a fake name on the bill; do it. Sorting who owes what when the house finally dissolves is a fucking nightmare and it helps for future credit approval situations if you didn't get stiffed with a zillion dollar gas bill you are never going to be able to pay off. Francis Bacon and Hunter Thompson will never be able to get the phone back on in Adelaide again, let me tell you.
A lot of people say never live with your friends but that's bollocks; way less chance of having to deal with those"Holy Shit You Are A Total Physco" 3am moments if you have a good idea of what kind of person they are beforehand.
The advice about hiding your pot is crucial.
Don't live with anyone who sticks cute posters of cats or horses on the wall.

Seriously?

Not kidding about the sugar glider. I didn't even know what it was until he brought it home. Poor thing, fucking asshole kept it in what was basically an aquarium, whatever glass cage, no water. One time it got out and I refused to help him catch it. I kept hoping it would bite him. There's no way that a sugar glider belongs in captivity in an apartment on the east side of Indianapolis, especially when the apartment is inhabited by three idiots who do nothing but smoke weed and cigarettes.

The sugar glider died. Big surprise.

Yet another reason I heart CHUD: I never heard of a "sugar glider" until today.

Neither had I. The look on the one in the Wikipedia picture's face is making me hate Keith's ex-roommate. I'm such a sap.

I actually just started this experience. I got the letter at the start of the summer with my room number and my roommate's name. Halfway through the summer that future roommate died. Guy on the other side of the suite never showed. So I spent the first night alone in the suite before the roommate showed up unannounced the next day. He turned into kind of a nightmare. Smoker of both cigarettes and cigars, big time drinker, would come home with the most bizarre smells. Guy was constantly coming home drunk and talking about "making me have fun whether I liked it or not". I work 32 hours a week and go to school full time, when I get home at night I just want to bomb out for a while and go to bed. So I knew that wasn't going to work. I'm now by myself in the room across the suite and loving it. I haven't decided if I'm going to give the roommate experience another shot next semester or year.

The bathroom actually hasn't been a big concern, helps that a guy comes once a week to clean it but I have Oust spray and air fresheners if shit gets bad.

Yeah, I'm on a split with my girlfriend right now and living with friends (a couple). We were already chill beforehand, and the dynamics of their relationship with me lurking around the edges works better than I had expected. And their futon is surprisingly comfy.

This, sorta. At least the current roommate pays me back for whatever of mine he drinks by buying the equivalent of whatever he had, if not more.

This should be a rule of life. The next chickenshit in my office that leaves a random note in the kitchen griping about someone using their condiments is going to get slapped.

I'd agree, but I'm basically chilling in a 1-br in West Hollywood for $300 a month, which is perfect for me to try and get my shit together financially before I move on. It's more or less a crash pad, but it's perfect since I have company to take my mind off of the split and keep me in line instead of running back to her. Moving all my shit around sucked, and not having a definitive space and place to put stuff is annoying, but it's not the end of the world.

Technical foul! Jake is not a roommate. Jake is crashing. People who crash are generally on really good behavior, or packing up their shit to go take advantage of someone else.

Fuck! Okay, rescinded.

I think there's an important distinction to be made between temporary cohabitants who are grateful for the futon, and roommates who believe their name on a lease entitles them to leave their pubes all over. I'd take short term crashers helping out with the rent any day.

Story! Story!

Wait, shaving your pubes onto one of your roommates' toothbrush isn't acceptable?

Dammit....

Use your imagination.

I'm in a bad mood now.
With the major exception of... brother-in-laws. Trust me. It's statistically proven that BILs are NO help to ANYONE.

Oh and I swear, it was the Pube Fairy that did it.

No, I don't think I will....

This was pretty much how my first normal roommate situation was for me. When I was in the Army in basic training we had a a 60 man bay(one big room, like in full metal jacket) which sucked but since you dont get free time was not a big deal and its only two and a half months. Then when I went to training school it was on to a 20 by 20 room with seven other guys in four bunk beds for another seven months. Figuring it couldnt go anywhere but up I was looking forward to finishing that up.

Finally I got to my regular duty station in hawaii where you just need to share a room with one other person. In three years I had four roommates of varying quality but the first one I had was just like yours. I get to the barracks for the first time and they assign me an empty room which was awesome for a month or so until one day I come home from work and there's some random guy with an extremely thick southern accent(who, oddly, referred to everyone as "dawg" but only listened to country music) sitting on my sofa and playing my playstation while smoking a cigarette. He had a cd collection consisting of maybe three different artists and listened to them again and again making it impossible to be in the room for more than an hour. He also had the habit of going to the on post club and getting trashed before coming home without the ability the control the volume of his voice and to top it all off, he once puked in the hallway outside our door and then tracked it in onto the carpet. Luckily the room situation in the barracks is pretty fluid so its not too hard to get a new room.

Now that Im out I again have a roommate but like a bunch of other people have said he's someone Ive known since high school so we get along really well and our apartment is designed with the rooms at opposite ends and we have our own bathrooms so it never feels crowded.

My housemates and I have a sweet set-up. Basically, roommate's # 1 dad moved to Bermuda and wanted to keep his house, so he rents it out pretty cheap to the three of us. We were all friends before hand, so it works out well.

Most of the time. Sometimes we end up in a weird two-against-one situation. For example, roommate #2 comes ecstatic because a friend of his knows the Imax movie voices guy ("Imagine yourself in a tropical rain forest, right before a storm..."). In fact, movie voice guy has even done a answering machine message for the friend ("Chad and David are not here, here, or here."). Now we're both freaking out because we can use the message to create our own movie-voice guy answering machine message. So we knock on roommate #1's door, play her the message and tell her, and she just looks at us unimpressed and says "Yeah, so?" How can you not be excited about this? How can I live with someone who doesn't care that we have IMax guy as our answering machine?

I will say this: If you have to choose, always, ALWAYS choose Stoners over Alcoholics. Seriously. Stoners just lie about, harmlessly, and sure, that might be annoying when chores need to be done, but it's way better than the alternative.

The alternative being roommate number one choking roommate number two in a drunken rage, fleeing down the street with no clothes on, and then having roommate number two come into your room sobbing and slurring about how roommate number one tried to kill him, all at 4 AM when you've got work in the morning.

...Fuck alcohol.

Smoking weed actually becomes a way to solve problems, too. I don't know how many issues in this house have been solved with the sentence "Lets just get stoned and forget about it." Unlike alcohol which seems to magnify every problem when people are on edge with each other.

Woah. No kidding, all the fucked up things I've ever seen people do have been alcohol induced. People who smoke weed are generally peaceful and lazy

Peaceful and lazy, but when it comes to cleaning their own fucking god damn dishes and taking out the garbage, well that's just not their problem.

I'm not the kind of person who does well living with other people. Hell I can barely hold it together living with my wife and kid.

It is a major two edged sword. Their standards for what is clean also seem to be pretty low. Try to get them to clean up the bathroom. They will wipe the sink down and consider it done.

The only time I've ever had a full on fight with someone was predicated by my roommate at the time saying 'Lets gets stoned and forget about it'. Being loveably lazy is all well and good, but I'd never, ever, recommend a Stoner as a roommate/housemate.

I mean at least alcoholics are vaguely interesting, I must have heard the same shit two dozen times from my stoner roommate over the course of a few months.

This is true. Take this hilarious (and 100% true) loud conversation I heard while trying to sleep:

Roommate number two: "Bob...BOB! Listen to me man! Just listen! Remember who you are! Your name is Bob! You're from North Dakota...I...I don't really know that much else about you, but what I do know is that you're my friend...and if you punch me in the face ONE MORE FUCKING TIME, that all goes out the window!"

Roommate number one: "I'm on your side, I'm on your side man...that's why I punched you in the face."


Apparently roommate number one thought roommate number two was an undercover FBI agent.

It sounds like you live with the characters in Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

It's funny until it happens to you.

I haven't caught up on this thread yet but I'll throw in my perspective. The past four years (college) I've spent living with at least two other roommates, most years three, and finally this year I'm living by myself. I absolutely love it. My freshman year in college I dormed with good friends from high school and we all hated each other after we moved out. The next year I lived with some other guys that I was friends with and we all hated each other at the end. The next year I lived with three random roommates and we got along great. The next year I lived with a good friend (guy) and an acquaintance (girl). I no longer talk to my friend and the girl and I had a great time living together and keep in contact still.

Vaguely knowing a person or not knowing them at all always works out better than living with friends. Just a fact.

When I was in my twenties, I lived in a shared house with four computer programmers. That equalled lots of money and no social skills. One of the guys was the owner and blew his trust fund buying the house, then got two of the other guys to co-sign.

Co-signee #1 got passed over by a girl he'd had a long-distance crush on, and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Co-signee #2 was a huffer and suffocated with a bag over his head about a year after. Later, I learned that the owner had first tried to get #2 to assume #1's debt, then moved on to sue the kid's family. Classy guy. He got in a huge motorcycle accident.

I live alone.

P.S. Hide your porn.

Actually, the food wasn't bad. We all cooked. One guy, though, always made too much food. It was his way of trying to get everyone together but it meant huge pots of freezer-burned pasta and chicken taking up space.

And this was before the Internet really hit, so there wasn't a whole lot of in-house computer activity going on.

Hear hear! I seem to be the only stoner roommate in existence who actually cleans. I was raised by neat freaks, so I always take out the garbage when it's full and tend to spend my evenings getting really baked and then doing the dishes or sweeping before I watch a movie or something. Lazy people who smoke pot are just lazy.

I've always lived with best friends, and these people are all still my best friends, so I'm not one of those people who advocates living with strangers. The only problem with my friends is that while I love them they are all fucking pigs! One's a stoner, one's an alcoholic, and one is always sober, but they all seem to enjoy living in their own FILTH! Being the only person out of four who is willing to clean the bathroom or do anything besides sit on your ass after work gets very frustrating after a few months, let alone a year or more. Also sometimes they eat all your food, that's frustrating as well.

You've had sugar glider issues, too? I'd share a slightly similar story, but it wouldn't make any sense out of context.

...wanna be roommates?

I'm also outing myself as a clean stoner. You kinda of need to be good at cleaning as a young stoner when non-cool people visit. It's not really kosher to be leaving your purple plastic bong lying around in plain site.
Getting baked, putting on some decent tunes* and doing a house clean is one of the better things you can do with a few hours to yourself.

Yeah I do this. I wish I could resist but at 2am that half eaten packet of chips my housemate is saving or the left over roast I didn't have any hand in preparing is suddenly the best fucking meal you could ever have.
I always always always make up for it the next day though.
If I remember.



* I find Sigur Ros or Radiohead is best. If it's a nice spring day; Air.

I'm just going to say avoid it if you can. I have lived exactly 12 months with a friend I've had for 7 years now. I chose a roommate so that I could get out of debt, and hey, an extra $400+ a month is pretty damn nice. After we started discussing it I made a point to pay closer attention to how he was at his own place. He cooked a lot, which is fine, but he also always cleaned up. Put dishes immediately in the dishwasher, took out the trash, kept his place pretty damn clean, especially the bathroom.

But about 3 months into living together he got a girlfriend. He stopped cleaning...period. His bathroom will literally make you gag when you walk in. He has half filled glasses sitting around his room and desk, empty water bottles, and dirty plates. I once saw a cookie cake sitting on a chair in his room for 2 weeks and change, not covered at all.

The past couple months I've been really, really getting pissed at his attitude towards cleaning...which is, I'm not going to do it because I'm a lazy fucker. He cannot even take out a trash bag, let alone walk it out to the trash compactor. This past Friday I cleaned the entire kitchen, dishes, trash can, mopped, washed off the cabinet space, cleaned the stove top. When I got back from my night out with my lady friend we were absolutely disgusted by the place.

Two bowls half filled with milk (on a hot Texas day, and he does this DAILY), a plate with a half ate salad sitting out, stains from god knows what on the cabinets, some red stains from something on the walls and laundry room door, and some weird crap on the floor that made walking on the tile a challenge. When I asked him to please take 10 seconds to rinse out glasses and bowls and put them in the sink, especially milk so it doesn't stink the place up he just shrugged and said "You'll smell it before me" and walked off. A bit later he actually started the dishwasher while my girl and I were watching a movie, so I went in and turned it off so we could hear the movie, and would start it again later. He came in like 15 minutes later and started it again. I just looked at him dumbfounded. So I turned it off again. Then he came in and started yelling at me for turning off the dishwasher and "wasting dish soap" so I told him he never pays for any kind of communal products in the apartment, especially cleaning stuff, so shut the fuck up.

I asked his girlfriend to say something to him about it, and maybe he would stop being such a disgusting bum. She obviously isn't bothered by it. He yells at her and treats her like shit, and makes no effort to be cleaner when she is around, and she follows his lead in being a filthy motherfucker.

On top of that, he complains to me about the cost of bills and tried to refuse to pay cable and electricity one month. I went into his room and started carrying shit out to the apartment breezeway and told him to get the fuck out then. So he paid the bills but still bitches every month while refusing to get better than his shitty $7.50/hr stocking job at Target.

So no, don't get a fucking roommate. I'm meeting my leasing manager today to see about keeping my place for a cheap 18 month lease, or getting a 1BR at the end of the current lease (6 more months, 6 more months).

EDIT: Oh, and if you like peace and quiet at all, fucking forget about it. Not happening. I can't get 10 minutes of quiet before my roommate starts singing at the top of his lungs, turns on music at his desk or in his bedroom at just high enough level so I can't hear the TV or read a book in peace, or hear him and his girlfriend fighting.

I've got that beat man. Things for me are going that way. This mother fucker is one of those kids who had their mom clean their dishes, wash their sheets, fold their clothes... I should probably try to get out before I explode.

Do it man. I'm going to see today about the possibility of moving into a 1BR without breaking my lease if his girlfriend moves in with him and takes my spot on the lease. He really stepped over the line when he started being a smartass to my girl, and I really don't need to stomp him into the floor and spend a weekend in a holding tank.

One of the things to keep in mind about rooming with strangers instead of friends... you're completely taken off-guard when that psycho ex show up. Not to mention the clepto-maniacs they may invite over. CDs, DVDs, video games, checkbooks... keep your stuff outta common areas.

So I'm guessing the consensus is: people suck, so here's hoping you get lucky? Sounds a lot like life in general.

Another thing is, when getting a place, make sure your room and his room have a good deal of distance between them. I literally can hear my roommate cough in his room, which makes it extremely awkward when I have a lady friend over; it's always in the back of my mind that he can hear every...single...word we say.

This is not meant to be a sweeping generalization, but the two instances where I've shared living space with an only child has been a nightmare. I grew up with several brothers and sisters, and sure we fought, but we knew how to compromise. That was essential.

These two I'm talking about were the most self centered, selfish pricks known to man.

I had the opposite. My only child roommate was a model roommate.

To add another sweeping generalization to the mix, I think females probably make overall better roommates than males, as long as you don't sleep with them. Most can cook to some extent, like the place clean, and enjoy soft aromas that please the nasal passages. Whereas we men piss all over the side of the toilet, drunk or not, and don't clean it for months.

Sexis---wait...that's a positive...argh. So confused.

I'm batting .000 in that case, then, as the one female I ever roomed with was a total slob, late on the bills and ended up killing one of her turtles because, hey, guess what? I don't know how to clean a turtle terarium, so thanks for the heads up you gave (none) when you decided to leave for a week. Oh, and thanks for bailing five months into the lease. Glad you manned up and paid the rent, though.

I moved out when I was 16, and, aside from the one year I lived in a dorm, always had female roommates. And even the one year I was in the dorm my roommate (whom I had known for 15 years) was never there, so a girl I met at school ended up staying there more often than he did. So I don't have any real basis for comparison when I say female roommates are pretty cool. Until the inevitable sexual tension that results in intercourse, which ruined it every time (except for the last one, to whom I am married).

ETA: This post seems to infer that I lived with tons of girls, and rocked them all, which is inaccurate. I had 2 steady female roommates, and then my wife.