Flatmates

[TerokNor]

Flatmates! Am I glad, when I have a place without a flatmate again.

My flatmate has a job, where she has not much to do (even has time to read a novel at work), gets a lot money for this and has a good amount of sparetime on her hand.

I study and we have lots to do this semester. This weekend we also have lessons. So after a normal study-week I had today 9 hours at university and tomorrow on Sunday 6 more and then the next study week starts...and I have hundereds of pages to read after the time at university.
So I just come home, feeling quite tired, sitting down for finding some relaxion and she: When do you think about cleaning the stove/herd?
Me: Not this weekend.
She: But I want to cook now.
Me: Then clean it yourself.
Ok, that was rude and she is angry now (though she did it now herself, cause I am a stubborn creature and while I do everything at one point in time, I do it in my time and not when someone says, do it now...actually when someone says do it now, the possibility that I do it sinks dramatically..might be somewhat childish, but I simply don´t like people telling me what to do). Also because we are both not untidy (though she is somewhat more tidy then I am..but then ...she has the money to pay someone to clean for her) the stove cleaning is something like 2 minutes, as it is not truly dirty. OK, this week is my cleaning week and not hers, but come one... she knew I just had 9 exausting hours behind me while she had the whole day time for nice things... is it so hard then to just take a wet cloth, wipe over it and be done with it, without bothering me?
Oh I know I am overreacting, but I hate it, when I finally have a bit time to relax and then comes an order to do housework.
And as I know her...we will have another discussion about her cleaning that damn stove the next time I step under her eyes.

Allright...rant over.

Do you have a flatmate/ or had one once? How do/did you like having one?

TerokNor

 

[RoJoHen]

I have had many roommates. Let me count them for you...

2003: My first year of college, I lived in a dorm room with Roommate A. (1 roommate)

2004: Second year of college, Roommate A and I got a larger dorm room and added Roommate B. (2 roommates)

2005: Third year of college, Roommates A and B found other friends and lived with them. I also found other friends and lived with them. Enter Roommates C, D, and E. We lived in a 4-bedroom townhouse. Roommate D's girlfriend also pretty much lived at our house, too. (3 roommates, 4 if you count the girlfriend)

2006: Senior year, We moved into a 5-bedroom and added Roommate F. (4 roommates; Roommate D dumped his girlfriend)

2007: Roommate D did an exchange program in China, so we traded him in for Roommate G. Roommate E moved out of state, so we traded him in for Roommate H. We also moved to a 6-bedroom house and added Roommate I. With Roommate D in China, his old girlfriend started dating Roommate I and practically lived with us once again. Roommates H and I were one year younger than the rest us, and therefore were still going to school. The rest of us has graduated and remained in town for our jobs. (5 roommates, 6 if you count the girlfriend).

2008: With college over for all roommates, we moved on. Some of us left town, while others remained. Roommates C, F, and G got a place in the same apartment complex as me. C and I lived alone, while F and G continued to live together in a 2-bedroom apartment. (0 roommates)

2009: C, F, G, and myself remain in the same apartments from the previous year. I move out of town towards the end of the year. (0 roommates)

2010 (current): I move back into town and rent a 2-bedroom house. Roommate C doesn't want to extend the lease for his apartment, so he moves in with me. (1 roommate)

Roommate C is my best friend, and (not including the time we had our own places) I have lived with him for 4 years.

So, let's recap:

2003: 1 roommate
2004: 2 roommates
2005: 3 roommates
2006: 4 roommates
2007: 5 roommates
2008: 0 roommates
2009: 0 roommates
2010: 1 roommate

Aside from minor nitpicks, I got along well with all of my roommates. I do blame roommates A and B for the decline in my school work, though. When you come home from work at 9pm and find your roommates throwing a party and doing beer bongs, it's hard to do your homework!

 

[TerokNor]

Wow...these are certainly a lot roommates. Seems you like to have them. Do you prefer having a roommate with you than living alone?
Oh well, its not that she and I don´t get along at all...we do most of the time (though I would not call her a friend), however I am nontheless looking forward to my own apartement again at one point in time.

TerokNor

 

[clint g]

Aside from minor nitpicks, I got along well with all of my roommates. I do blame roommates A and B for the decline in my school work, though. When you come home from work at 9pm and find your roommates throwing a party and doing beer bongs, it's hard to do your homework!

Yeah, I was that asshole The fucked up part is, I still graduated in four years with a respectable GPA. The roomates whose GPAs I destroyed? They're working on year 6

 

[RoJoHen]

I actually really prefer the situation I have now. My roommate and I tend to work opposite shifts, so we don't see each other a whole lot. When I wake up, he's already left for work. By the time I get home from work, he's already in bed. It gives us plenty of time to ourselves, so that when we eventually do have the same day off, we actually enjoy hanging out together. He is my best friend, but if we see too much of each other, we really start to get on each other's nerves. The current setup is perfect.

 

[RoJoHen]

Aside from minor nitpicks, I got along well with all of my roommates. I do blame roommates A and B for the decline in my school work, though. When you come home from work at 9pm and find your roommates throwing a party and doing beer bongs, it's hard to do your homework!

Yeah, I was that asshole The fucked up part is, I still graduated in four years with a respectable GPA. The roomates whose GPAs I destroyed? They're working on year 6

For what it's worth, none of our degrees are doing us any good anyway, so I'm glad I at least got to have fun.

 

[Daneel]

When I finally moved out of my parents' house at 25, I decided to live on my own. I did that for a couple of years, but it got a bit pricey. In fact, for the first time in my life, I found myself in debt.

So I decided to find some shared accommodation and reduce my monthly rent. Plus, living by myself was starting to get a little lonely (even though I enjoy my space and solitude, I find I do occasionally miss having other people around). In August, I moved into a house; I was sharing the second floor with four other people.

Dear god, was that ever a mistake. Out of the other four people, three were guys and one was a girl... and that one girl was horrible. Truly, truly horrible. She was loud and obnoxious. She blared her music at all hours. She left her food scraps out all the time (no wonder we had cockroaches in the kitchen). She left her belongings in the common areas anywhere she damn well wanted (often in the way of the rest of us). She smoked inside (which is against the house rules). She was extremely messy. She had mood swings, and would often get into terrible fights with her ostensible friends that she would bring over (one that occurred while I was out apparently got physical -- the police were even involved). She was racist (when she felt the landlord wasn't being fair to her, she remarked that she didn't understand why she was "being treated like a black person"). And I can't recall a time I didn't see her drunk and/or stoned.

She made it a living hell in that house. Fortunately, the landlord had also had enough of her bullshit and gave her an eviction notice. This past Tuesday, she moved out. The rest of us haven't been this happy in months. In fact, we actually had a small celebration later that night.

One of the other guys moved out recently as well, which was probably also for the best. He wasn't nearly as bad as her -- in fact, he was an okay guy, for the most part. However, he's had some substance abuse problems which made me a little uneasy. Now there's just three of us here, and I have no issues with the other two guys.

The landlord might want to rent out one of the vacant rooms to someone in the near future -- I'd rather he didn't (three people here seems ideal), but it's not really my call. I just hope he has a better screening process this time around, and that maybe the rest of us living here will get a say in the matter.

 

[Finn]

I never had a roommate outside of the dorms. But by the end of May, I will have one.

 

[Vulcan Princess]

I had the roommate from hell once. It started out ok. My really great roommate moved in with her boyfriend, so I needed someone to fill her room. I put up an ad on craigslist, and I kept getting really flaky responses. I was starting to get desperate when I got a non-flaky response.

She was in her early 40's with a 13 year old daughter. She and her husband were going through a divorce, and she needed a place to stay. I met her and her daughter, and they seemed fine, so I let them move in. (They were sharing the room.) Everything went fine for a year or so, but her husband started hanging around. He practically moved in at one point, and I told my roommate that I wasn't ok with this. So, then he started hanging around all day and sleeping in the car at night, coming back up to shower at 6 am. (He's an alcoholic who can't hold down a job.) My sister (who was also living in the apartment at the time) and I were still uncomfortable with this.

When I brought up the point that we had agreed that he wouldn't hang around so much, she started yelling and hollering and insulting me. Then she avoided me for three days. I was fed up with the apartment anyway, so I found another place, moved out, and paid a handsome sum of money to buy out my portion and my sister's portion of the lease. (My sister moved back in with our parents.)

The most outrageous part is that she immediately found new roommates and charged them market rate rent (thus pocketing the money I paid to buy out the lease), then she had the nerve to ask me for more money to pay her water bill for the three months left in the lease after I had moved out! I told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn't getting another penny from me.

Oh, and I was the one who put down the security deposit, and I know I'll never see it again. (She renewed the lease, and I'm sure she'll trash the place when she moves out or pocket the deposit.)

I'm so never having roommates again!

 

[Holdfast]

The OP's post pretty much describes the kind of petty trivial argument that someone else in your home brings into your life.

No fucking way am I sharing my house with a tenant. A mate of mine has a moderately large house and rents out several rooms. Financially, it works out very well for him (esp. with virtually zero mortgage interest rates), and he's happy with that lifestyle but I would hate it. When I get home, I want to be able to lock the front door, shut out other people, and be left in blissful peace in an environment I control absolutely.

I shared a house with a few others for about 4 months or so back in university; moved out to a place of my own as soon as I could. I didn't mind living in halls the first few years despite sharing kitchens/bathrooms/etc, because you still had a room of your own that was separate from others. But a house adds a different level of intimacy compared to halls, and not in a good way. They weren't bad people and in fact were very easy to live with, but I just didn't want to share my home with anyone else.

 

[thestrangequark]

I love my roommates, and they really help to make the apartment feel like home. We all get along well, we never fight, I can share almost anything with them. The only point of contention we have is their mind-numbing new-age beliefs. I can handle the references to astrology, being told that my "energy just seems off" today, or coming home to a spread of tarot cards on the table (one of them is even a Reiki Healer, oh dear). I did confront one of them about her stupidity in regards to the microwave though: I tried to explain to her the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, I tried to point out the flawed reasoning behind refusing to use a microwave while jabbering on a cell phone for hours, I reminded her that microwaves have been in use for 60 years and no one has ever gotten sick, and so on, but I realized I'd reached a dead end when she said that a microwave, "chemically alters your food so your body can't recognize it anymore." I said, "The definition of cooking is to chemically alter food!" and then retreated to my room to read my Scientific American and cuddle my Francis Bacon plushy.

 

[TheBrew]

I live with my best friend, so it is pretty great. We do a lot together, but we also don't see each other all the time (what with having girlfriends and all). We even work for the same company, but at different departments (and locations right now), so we still get our daily space.

I love living with someone because I can come home to someone to hang out with. Of course, there is a small list of people I would actually live with, so there is a weird dichotomy there.