The toilet-blocking housemate…

“Two days before our New Year house party, my Czech housemate thought it would be a good idea to flush his smelly pasta (from earlier on in the week) down the toilet. Of course, this blocked it, and because it was Hogmanay, the letting agent couldn’t get an emergency plumber in before January 3. During our party, we had to keep going to the toilet in the pub downstairs. When I asked him why he didn’t put it in the bin, he replied “I didn’t want the kitchen to smell”. I also asked him why he hadn’t put it directly in the outside bin, but apparently that was “too far down the stairs!” The same guy would also leave plates of unfinished food all over the living room, and then be surprised why we had a mouse problem. Now, thankfully, I have my own place.”

The paranoid housemate…

“I lived with a guy who used steroids, which would make him really paranoid. To combat it, he would flood the kitchen floor, before sitting in the middle of it with no clothes on.

The angry housemate…

“I once lived with a manic depressant Polish guy who the letting agency had previously moved six times, simply because the houses were ‘not up to his standards’. We had a house of five people, but no one except this guy could make any noise between 4pm and 8am – not even the kids on the playground next door. I needed to wash my Tag Rugby kit one morning at about 7.30am, which I thought would be alright. The second the wash started, he proceeded to scream at me, break the washing machine door and cut off the power in the house. After a lot of yelling, he eventually left for work. I was so shaken that my boyfriend had to walk to work with me. All of us had put in complaints about him, and asked for his eviction under circumstances of abuse and potential bodily harm, but they had all been dismissed. That night, he hugged me and handed me a letter requesting my eviction – since then, he has had all the others evicted too.”

The housemate who refused to pay…

“I once had a housemate, who, when we had all gone home for the Christmas holidays, decided to invite her boyfriend over. I returned home to find the heating on at 32°C, because they “fancied a fake Christmas BBQ”. When the extra-large bill came through, she refused to pay. The same girl would park around the corner and hide, or come home really late so she could avoid paying. I moved out in January, and the last I heard, she is still refusing to pay.”

The health-hazard housemates…

“In my first year of university, I shared accommodation with two Chinese flatmates and one other girl. The two Chinese girls were so messy and unhygienic in the kitchen, you could’ve called it a health hazard. They left unclean rice cookers all over the floor, and then raw meat would just get left out on our dining table. We did leave some notes asking if they could clean, but that only resulted in Chinese messages appearing on my fridge in magnetic letters – we looked them up on Google translate, and they weren’t particularly polite. We did confront them too, but it was fruitless. At the end of the year, they left three weeks before term had finished. In order to avoid getting fined, we had to throw away all their rubbish and clean out their mouldy cupboards – not exactly what I had in mind for end-of-term celebrations!”

The secretive housemate…

“I had a flat mate who wrote an internet blog about how much she hated living with us. She wrote it in code, as though she knew we were reading it!”

The thieving housemates…

 “I had a Spanish couple renting a room in my mum’s house – I only found out how terrible they were when their friend moved in, and they left. Apparently, they used to wear my clothes (which they then stole when they moved out), use the tea towels to wipe their feet when I wasn’t in, eat my food and use my toiletries. They also stained the lacquered kitchen table by leaving used cotton buds all over it, coated with nail polish remover. Their friend wasn’t much better – she spilt red wine all over my white carpet and didn’t bother to clean it up. Her ex-boyfriend threatened to drive his car through the front of the house too. Needless to say, I haven’t been very lucky with my ex-housemates!”

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