Shared houses – Dumb things housemates do..

Not me but my brother in Detroit…. his wife’s son by her first marriage was sharing a house in Ann Arbor, not working, dealing skunk and living with his dog, which was paralysed from the waist down and incontinent. Eventually even his laid-back housemates got fed up with the stink of weed and dog excrement and kicked him out. My bro and a friend had to hire a van and they moved him into my brother’s cellar where he took up residence with the dog on a mattress. Quite soon the stink permeated through the whole house and after a couple of months of his wife doing nothing at all about it, my bro lost his rag and kicked the son out. The son then refused to talk to his mother and she moved out to her sister’s house leaving my brother for about the fourth time in their rocky marriage.

Dunno why he tolerates her really, she’s completely barking, she has a mental breakdown every time they travel to the UK and she and her friends are all taking Prozac and having therapy.

We had a couple who moved in to replace someone who was away for six months studying abroad. They managed to set fire to kitchen TWICE, mostly by getting stoned, then hungry, then more stoned, and forgetting they’d put stuff in the oven / on the hob.

One of the girls was very well spoken. But one day we heard her on the phone to her parents, talking with a really heavy Scottish accent. Turns out she was from Scotland, but liked to sound posh when she met new people, and had kept it up for nearly a year!

Had a friend like that. Claimed to be half Irish. Born and bred in Kent, just like parents, but had an Irish grandmother. Pure Kentish accent all the time at school, but the moment there was a stranger or someone new in the group, out would come the Irish accent.

ex-flatmate used to brag about having 2 MSc’s. Shame all that intelligence had stolen all his common sense:

stacked glasses and mugs upright in the dishwasher – and then compained saying the dishwasher wasn’t very good, and wasn’t draining properly 🙄

vaccumm cleaner had an on/off switch, and a suck controller on the handle (that would turn off the motor at position 0). he couldn’t work out how to use it, and his grandparents were visiting, so he ran to the shop to buy a new vaccuum cleaner. then told me my one was broken and didn’t work. 🙄 then when i showed him how to use it, he claimed he had done that earlier 🙄

the self styled enviro-anarchist vegan nutjob who wore a leather trenchcoat and cowboy hat at all times and had bottles of gin stashed all over the house, would occasionally violently rant at you during breakfast about the bioapocalypse

I didn’t know you’d lived with Junkyard.

Thank god he dd not realise I had nothing on under the coat 😉

A couple of month back a flatmate had bought a ready-meal jacket potato. Now, our microwave says ‘Microwave Oven’ on the front. He threw the thing in, still in the foil tray and then stuck it on for ten minutes.

He still doesn’t understand why the “Oven” doesn’t work anymore. He seriously thought that the oven button would make it work like the normal oven, right next to it.

Blimey, I thought my housemate leaving used teabags next to the kettle on a small saucer was bad until I read some of this.

A good friend of mine (now director of an IT company) used to pee in the sink… perhaps not that uncommon in itself, but he used to do it over any dishes which happened to be in the sink, and would do so even when the rest of us were in the room.

He had an extensive collection of “art movies”. There was one known as “the glove puppets” for reasons best not discussed on a family forum which became particularly popular in our student household for some reason. It became a weekly game for the girls in the house to invite a fella back for a cup of tea at the end of a night out and for them to stick it on, just so they could see his reaction… I saw a number of them sprinting towards the door looking very pale. That was all until the tape got stuck in the (hired) VCR. One of my female housemates called the engineer out without realising it was THAT tape. Look on her face when the engineer pressed play was a picture…

Later that year we found one of our other female housemates splayed out semi-concious eating a kebab off the filthy (carpeted) kitchen floor without the aid of her hands… classy!

Shared a house in my final year with a mate who had dropped out in the first and devoted his efforts in the remaining years to making a fortune from becoming some sort of combination of Lovejoy and Howard Marks. He managed to stuff the flat with piles of cack bought from jumble sales and car boot sales which no one else wanted whilst dealing with the muddled reality of shifting copious amounts of industrial strength green matter. It really wasn’t going to end well…

One of the disappearing flatmate types – split up with his girlfriend and just wandered out one day. 4 or 5 days later this registered with the rest of us and we went into his room to see if he’d left a note (actually to see if he had owt worth taking in case he’d topped himself…)

Next to his bed was a cup of white liquid, somewhat gloopy in nature and definitely man made. Still remember that the mug was yellow and had the acid smiley face on.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, under his bed was another two pints of the stuff…

I lived with a guy who wore the same old, frayed, wooly jumper every day.

One day he caught the frayed sleeve in the gas hob and set his arm smouldering. His response was to panic and pour his cup of tea over it, scalding himself to add to the burn.

Very distracting thread!

I have a few but easiest one to remember is an 18yo art student girl, lost her keys very early in the tenancy and would just let herself in by putting her hand through the letterbox…

Another guy who was sub letting over the summer, addicted to ketamin, lived in an actual cupboard, odd guy

I shared a house with a guy who was obsessed with porn. There were piles of grot all over the house. The airing cupboard was stuffed to the gunnels with sticky copies Razzle and Fiesta. There was no way you could invite anyone sensitive round, as the second you opened the front door you’d be greeted to the unmistakable screams of some LA porn Starlet getting it up the Garry. It was literally on the telly 24/7. Other people watched Corrie. We had Anal Intruders 4

On the way back from the pub, he’d call at the hatch at the 24 hour garage, and get the poor guy to go to the magazines and flick through Readers Wives, or Asian Babes for him while he thoughtfully made his selection.

When he discovered there was a knocking shop 5 doors down from us, his student loans were doomed!!! His regular phrase after watching Shaving Ryans Privates or something similar would be “**** this! I’m off for a blow job!!” as he disappeared out of the door, wallet in hand.

I wouldn’t mind, but his (long suffering) girlfriend was gorgeous!

I have a few but easiest one to remember is an 18yo art student girl, lost her keys very early in the tenancy and would just let herself in by putting her hand through the letterbox…

Another guy who was sub letting over the summer, addicted to ketamin, lived in an actual cupboard, odd guy
for a moment I though the 2 threads were related 🙂

1) In halls, one bloke keeps complaining about piss all over the easts in the bog. Went to the trouble of posters about it, the lot. Funny thing was, the piss stopped the moment he went back home for a few weeks… Obviously, piss was taken when he returned!

2) Later in a shared house, rather attractive female housemate had a habit of passing out pissed and naked on her bed. Only trouble was that her doorway faced the foot of her bed, and she seemed to sleep starfish…

In halls all of us bar one left early for Easter holidays, he stayed on for a week extra. The one left behind proceeded to use all our crockery, saucepans and cutlery before heading off for Easter himself, but proceeded to hide all the dirty stuff in everyone’s cupboards before we went. 3 weeks later I return with my parents to find mouldy encrusted food covering everything. We had a huge bath in halls, we had to soak everything in there for a day before we could wash it.

He turned up to uni with £100 of grot mags, apparently he and a mate had a competition to see who could spend £100 on it first. He decided to throw it all when he got a gf. He nearly sparked a riot with blokes rifling through the big bins looking for his stash.

Run out of dishwasher tablets, so a group decision was made that washing up liquid in the washer would do the trick instead….. 😯

Same person as above on a night out got so drunk they wouldn’t let him into a club. He had an argument with his girlfriend as she wanted to stay out and stormed off. Instead of going home to ours he let himself into her house and decided to stage a dirty protest, discovered by one of the 7 girls she shared with. I get in from a lecture the next day, bold as brass he told me exactly what he’d done and said “I’ve still got some sh!t between my toes”.

Same person again…. always drew the short straw on the bedroom pick and had got the downstairs rooms. So he didn’t have to trail round the house in the night to go for a pee he used to do it in a lemonade bottle and empty it every morning. His gf would use it too if she stayed over.

On leaving uni I had the same person staying with me for a while (despite being filthy he’s a top bloke) in a new flat. My gf at the time got in from work to find him sat at my PC with his trousers round his ankles apparently the flat was “too hot”. he also had an obsession with Lindsay Dawn McKenzie.

@mister P – in the end that’s why I moved! The kettle is above the bin so why on earth would you walk 10ft to the sink dripping tea everywhere & leave the tea bag & spoon there. He also had a habit of making peanut butter on toast but only eating the crust, working his way round the peanut butter then leaving it out display.

Not a funny story but worth a mention I suppose. Long story short – those few people who plotted to bomb Birdcage in Manchester along with the arndale but worse still the parade’s when soldiers return home after a tour. We ended up moving into their old flat which had a loft and in this loft were dozens of bags containing replica army/navy dress blue uniforms etc complete with insignia! Pretty grim thinking how close they came

Went into the kitchen one day to find a mate (who was muslim) cooking burgers. I said to him “are you supposed to be eating them?” he said “that’s hindus man, we’re allowed to eat beef”. I suggested to him that he check the ingredients of his Farmfoods value “burgers”. He’d been eating them for months apparently and started to feel quite ill.

Surely he didn’t expect that theynhad been slaughtered halal?

final one apparently after a night of red wine binging somebodies brother woke up and managed not to vomit in the room they had been lent for the night but out of a hall window, onto the bike rack complete with bikes (leaves quickly)

CharlieMungus – I have no idea what he thought! I think he’d lived a pretty sheltered life up until that point with Mum doing everything for him so probably hadn’t even thought of it.

Porn king – would fiddle with his 3.5″ discs to fit more on them (something to do with how far the heads move) and head off to uni overnight to download pron.

His girlfriend would visit every few weeks and he would spend his shifting his stash onto anyone else’s computer before flying it back again. We’re taking hundreds of discs here. Pkunzip got some hammer!

He was frequently found just wearing pants, bog roll in hand and computer booting up whereupon he’d say “it’s too warm in here” and start dabbing his sweaty folds of flab with said tissue…

I clearly lived with very normal people reading all that!

The only thing I have is the very straight guy I shared with for a few years who had a little notebook in which he would record everything he spent – I mean every single penny – and when he went home he would have to show the reconciliation to his parents who would check that it balanced perfectly. He used to start worrying if it every got a little out about what he would say. Odd.

semi-concious eating a kebab…..without the aid of her hands

Euphamism?

Depends if it was badly packed

semi-concious eating a kebab…..without the aid of her hands

Euphamism?

Unfortunately (or fortunately) not!

lived wit some oddballs at uni…
wolverhampton – had a guy called Pat in the room above mine, would stomp around at random times for no reason, he had very poor hygiene to the point where he could stink out the entire common room just by taking his shoes off..we had sky and one of the lads paid for a years subscription to the fantasy channel…every evening Pat would be in the common room watching the porn…if any girls came to visit he would put it on really loud and stare at them inappropriately…in the end we made to home made spoof movies about him which we premiered in front of him…
now to the guy who actually paid for the porn channel…he was called Ed but we nicknamed him Ned Flanders or Godboy on account that he was a churchgoer and was quite religious…he had the biggest stack of porn mags in his room given to him by his dad, who paid the credit card bill of for the porn channel…he also liked to steal your food and had a massive poster of Tony Blair above his bed…
another weirdo was the student from Malta who lived there…he would never come out of his room…unless he needed the toilet…he would order food in and expect the delivery guy to take t to his room…we went in once to see if he was ok and found him sitting there at his laptop in just his undies….he said the room was always too hot for him and regularly sat in his room in his undies…the sight of a very hairy 22 stone man with orange skin was enough to put anyone off…he lasted about 2 months before he buggered off back to Malta…also his hygiene was on a par with Pats…
guy next door to me would regularly pee in his sink…

manchester – lived in a house with some lads…one of whome would eat all the food without replacing it…he once finished off 15 eggs in one sitting….he would also take a dump then wash his arse in the bath with the shower leaving bits of shit in the bath…if you brought a girl home he would sit there perving at them especially their breasts…if we took him out he would go round touching up pissed fat girls on the dance floor and then come bragging to us….again had really poor hygiene…
another lad was worse…moved in to fill the spare box room…his hygiene was worse…if he left his bedroom door open the whole house would stink….we would have to beg him not to take his shoes off in the lounge…he did once and saw a bit of dirt on his toe…he picked it up and sniffed it and then starting to retch violently before running to the kitchen sink to empty his guts over the plates….if i hadnt been stopped by the others i would have battered him that night…we kicked him out after that so in revenge he stole a stack of cd’s from each of our rooms…]
lived above a restaurant i worked at in Clitheroe…the pub landlord next door would regularly lend us “movies” to watch at the end of the night….the chef who was one of the owners lived with us and would sit at the back of the tv room and insist on the lights being off to enhance the viewing experience….we’d try to block it out but you could always hear him knocking on off….things came to a head when he went into the bathroom and knocked one off while squatting on the toilet seat…he shot his load on the seat and left it there…one of the waiters fond it there and went and threatened to smash his head in if he did it again and made him clean the entire living quarters…he was another smelly ****t…and would always talk about his sex life and randomly ask everyone on tips on how to please his wife….
seems to be a recurring trend here…i seems to attract all the smelly bar stewards!! 😯

This is recent, knowing about looming redundancy and wife being a post-grad student, we moved in to a shared house aged 30. One French/Ghanaian girl moved in with personal habits that would make a monkey blush – food got left in pans for days in her room to be re-heated and consumed anything up to a week later. Ate loads of chicken-nugget, potato waffle oven cooked shit and never EVER showered/bathed. Would go to sleep fully clothed and then get up and go straight to work. The smell from her room towards the end of her tenancy (ground floor, beneath our bedroom), was enough to make us physically heave if we didn’t hold our breath when the door was open.

In previous shared houses, I just used to be the one to clean and everything as it was less grief than getting to arguing about stuff. Somehow I don’t manage that nowadays when it’s just me and the wife… hmmm, that’s bad.

Answering the door one day to find a sawn-off shotgun pointing at me has stuck in my mind somewhat.

It was being wielded by a gentleman who apparently wished to talk with the house-sharer who had moved out the week before, as a matter of some urgency, about some money that was owed…

Not a funny story but worth a mention I suppose. Long story short – those few people who plotted to bomb Birdcage in Manchester along with the arndale but worse still the parade’s when soldiers return home after a tour. We ended up moving into their old flat which had a loft and in this loft were dozens of bags containing replica army/navy dress blue uniforms etc complete with insignia! Pretty grim thinking how close they came

Plod obviously did a top notch job of searching the place, didn’t they.

Mine would be the housemate who had a little too much speed and went completely crazymental with a samurai sword at three o’clock Christmas morning, in a room full of lit candles.

Me and the third housemate weren’t able to do much about this at the time as our intoxicant of choice that night had been of the fungal variety and neither of us were capable of movement or coherent speech.

Of all the things you want to encounter while tripping on ‘shrooms, a crazy speedfreak going nuts with a sword really is low down the list.

I can include myself in this one 🙂

One of my housemates at uni was nicknamed ‘Girly’ because in a house of 6 blokes, he was clearly the most in touch with his feminine side and particularly the cleaning.

He used to always moan about the stacked up washing up and unemptied bins.

We took it on ourselves to see how far we could push him so we stopped throwing out the bin bags, leaving them for him to take out. After a few weeks of doing them alone, he finally broke and refused to do it any more. We continued not to empty them and so did he and it became a battle of wills. I think we ended up withabout 10 bags of rubbish when someone noticed that we now had rats…

Cue much cleaning and scrubbing by the 5 of us. Lesson learnt…

ononeorange – Member
I clearly lived with very normal people reading all that!

The only thing I have is the very straight guy I shared with for a few years who had a little notebook in which he would record everything he spent – I mean every single penny – and when he went home he would have to show the reconciliation to his parents who would check that it balanced perfectly. He used to start worrying if it every got a little out about what he would say. Odd.

Did you live in the same house as me in my story above? 🙂 A different housemate did that too…

Jesus these stories are excellent. My own son is 14 and he couldn’t boil water without burning it so I’d better be sure he can do all this stuff before he heads off to Uni. He smells too despite numerous requests to shower more than once a week.

Used to share a flat at uni with, amongst others, a Greek bloke that sang in a Greek Orthodox choir. That meant he had to practice. A lot. That was entertaining when waking up with a hangover, but he was a nice chap and used to do a stellar job of cleaning the kitchen when we got inspected.

Another bloke in a flat next door, committed veggie and OS2 fanboy, used to get wound up with us Windows people, so we used his meat free pans to cook beef chilli and leave it out for him to see. Things came to a head when someone stapled a few rashers of bacon to his door one night after a few pints.

Ah, happy memories.

Clubber – you weren’t in Sheffield in the mid/late 1980s, were you….?

I think I ought to own up to being guilty party on one occasion too. House to myself, line up a porno, sat on sofa cracking one off. Look up to see a little kids head poked up over the fence at the bottom of the garden watching. Curtains are there for a reason.

Nah, a fair bit later and further south 🙂

Clearly it’s not that uncommon!

Ah….for a moment I thought I knew who you might be. Indeed, obviously not uncommon (but still bloody weird).

@edlong they (30+ in full riot gear & a few in smarter clothes) turned up a year later. At 4am in the morning. Was also the same day COD world at war was released and me & a mate had spent the day playing Nazi zombies solid for nearly 20hrs of course we were in full dress blues and surrounded by numerous & various illegal substances we many others in the flats. Anyway, they kicked all of our doors in, burst in all the bedrooms. Then asked if anyone fits the description of a 5″7 Pakistani bloke? Of course that’s half of us here! Soon realized the blokes they were looking for were long gone & then they left…

Still got the socks!

So many stories.

The Scot who never washed and slept on the mattress, no sheet. I used to lay awake at night unable to sleep thinking about it. The smell in his room made me retch.

The rugby player who used to trim his fouled up feet in the lounge and cast the detritus behind the couch

The Mental Manc in halls who locked his room and played Orbital at 100db at 3am because we told him we didn’t want to live with him because of his propensity for unusual behaviour… 😯 Security eventually smashed the door down and dragged him out screaming.

I always made the freaks move out, life’s too short to tolerate them.

I live with 4 girls and another guy, and there’s currently 19 razors in our shower. The mind boggles…

This makes me feel nostalgic 🙂

Some of my friends at uni shared a house with some other people and a rat. We’re not talking about something that scurried away when you switched on the lights – it shared the kitchen when people were in it, eating scraps. One day my mate went to the cupboard for a cream cracker and found the full packet now empty with the rat lying there in a postprandial torpor looking back at him.

Someone stubbed their fag butts out in a half eaten takeaway pizza, then they all started doing it. The pizza was there for weeks accumulating butts.

Had an anorexic religious girl in 1st year at uni, then in 2nd year, shared with a girl who took up with a guy who thought he was a vampire. Very odd goings on in that flat.

I agree, girls are minging – dirtiest houses have been the ones I shared with girls. 5 girls in a house means a lot of hair in the plugholes, and we definitely played “Plughole Clearing Chicken”.

My boyfriend shared a house with 2 guys last year, and one slept with the other’s girlfriend whilst he was away for work – that became quite awkward!