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Crazy house/flatmate?

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Hat:
Guys, this is the thread I was born to post in. I have been both the horrible insane  flatmate with massive drug problems and strange people coming around at 3 am trying to barter a stereo for speed before, as well as the hard done by flatmate, so I like to think I have pretty decent perspective on what makes a decent flatmate and what doesn't.

Man, borrowing money off your housemates is a pain. Lending your housemates money is a pain. Basically I try to avoid doing either unless someone offers to lend me the money for something communal, like to chip in on a pizza or to grab some beers down the pub while the landlord inspects everything. I refuse to lend money except in the same circumstances, or if I know a brother is really hurting, and as Jimmy says


--- Quote from: JimmytheSquid on 14 Jan 2008, 17:13 ---I have a policy of never lending money unless i can afford to never get it back

--- End quote ---

This is good policy for a person to have.

The first house I lived in was a run down 4 bedroom place on top of another place. The bottom floor was sublet to a rather nice family who deserved better than the chaos that went on above them. The 4 bedrooms were each leased to a seperate person for 70 bucks a week, no bond, and water/electricity completely included. This was a very good deal for the time and place it was being offered, and as a result, the upstairs of the house wound up as kind of a beach for human driftwood. For the 8 months I lived there, the people I lived with were included but not limited to

- A huge football player type who kept leaving protein shakes around the place, as well as an impressive newspaper collection which if it was ever thrown out, or even tidied up, would send him into a psychosis, smashing furniture. I learned fast that it was simply not a good idea to leave anything that belonged to me out in the living room and eventually it was basically a few milkcrates and a bong, seeing as this guy stayed for my entire tenure in the house

- A speed dealer who was constantly out of state and offered me a cut to look after his stash while he was away. Little did I know that his clientèle were basically the worst of the worst. Eventually after the second week of having  strung out speed-heads turning up at my window at ridiculous hours of the morning I told the dude I couldn't look after his stuff anymore. For the next month after that I kept finding dog shit piled in front of the door of my room. We didn't even have a dog. I have no idea where he was getting this shit, but every morning I found dog shit he would be standing there, smiling at me.

- One guy who liked to steal cigarette lighters. Early on in the households life, we have a pretty good run of people. Newspaper man was yet to move in, and we had three of the rooms filled, one was me, the other were two good mates of mine I went to highschool with. We had a pretty communal house at the time and smoked a lot of weed, so we built up a pretty impressive collection of lighters in the lounge room, which still had couches and a coffee table at this point. Once this guy moved in, lighters started to disappear. He'd sit and have a session with us and when we'd finish there wouldn't be a lighter in the house. He only lived there for three weeks, but after he left, we looked under his mattress and there were about a hundred and fifty lighters of all shapes and sizes. I never got the point of that

Not to mention an exciting and colourful assortment of drug addicts, socially maligned goths, various drunks and punk kids who thought living in a somewhat dilapidated house without a bond was neat and meant they could punch out as many walls as they liked


The next place I moved in with a friend of mine who needed to rent out two of the bedrooms in the place he was renting at the moment. This is an excellent exercise in how not to conduct money matters amongst friends who live together, so pay attention kiddies.

He wanted to organize and promote a tour by a Sydney metal band who were looking to tour up here. He didn't have a lot of experience in promoting large gigs like this, god knows why they chose him. Anyway, the way this band (and presumably other bands) operated was they charged the promoter a fee (one thousand dollars in this case) and took a certain cut of the door. This left my friend needing to raise a thousand dollars, and I lent him 500. He eventually talked the band into performing with only that 500 up front and would pay them back the other 500 from his take on the door which he was sure to make.

So he puts on the show, and just barely makes enough to pay that extra 500 to the band and make the 500 dollars he needs to pay me back. So I figure, the dude put on a show, got some experience, he's not going to mind that he only broke even and I get that 500 bucks back right away, right?

Nope!

About a month later we are doing the shopping, which we always did as a household, as it works out cheaper, and he asks if he can borrow 25 bucks to cover the shopping for this week. I figure I can do that, 25 is not a lot to lend a housemate, especially for something they're going to consume anyway like communal food, so why not. Then I get my wallet out and realise he hasn't paid me back that 500 yet and I ask him what happened to it and it turns out he bought some new shit for his car and concert tickets and a bunch of superfluous shit. I foolishly lent him the 25 bucks for the shopping, which led to a year of constant hassle and cussing at this guy who was one of my best mates.

This was about a year and a half ago and we've smoothed it out and become mates again, but there is no way I would live with that dude ever again.

The house after that I was kind of the arsehole housemate. Not in a horrible way, and I blame Dovey for the major act of antagonism that lead to household tensions, but basically the long story short is I was living with a girl who owned her own  house, and she was working ridiculous hours to keep up the mortgage. Meanwhile the two other housemates were always at their boyfriend/girlfriends house, and only popped in to eat and basically make a mess. Meanwhile being blessed with a lot of spare time I picked up the slack for these two, and when I eventually got tired and stopped, everybody, including the relatively clean girl who I lived with jumped to the assumption that I had simply stopped cleaning up after myself and that I was responsible for all the mess in the house ever. I got yelled at a bunch about this, and then one night dovey was over visiting and we got hella drunk and in some sort of front balcony chillaxathon  I managed to damage one of the nice deckchairs and I basically had to leave a month or two after that because there was ice in her eyes

Once again, moved out, everythings fine now. Those sorts of tensions only exist when you're living in close quarters with someone.

Meanwhile, my latest flatmate is fantastic. She has lots of great furniture, loves my friends, doesn't mind my rampant drug abuse although she doesn't do them herself, likes a clean house and keeps it clean herself, and yet doesn't get on my case if I leave it a bit sloppy as long as I try to keep the common areas reasonably tidy. She shitkicked the phone people when they kept fucking us around on a wireless modem and got half off our first two phone bills as a result, and is constantly trying to set me up with her friends. She's rarely at home during the week, and I'm rarely at home during the weekends, so we only see each other sporadically at 6 am in the morning as I am coming home from work and she's leaving and basically at any point when we are home together we carry on conversations like regular human beings do.

I basically hit the jackpot.

Jimmy the Squid:
Guys you are making me feel bad. I haven't done any cleaning around here since Christmas. This includes washing up. To be fair though, neither has my brother and it's not as if I'm the only one making the mess. In fact, just five minutes ago I knocked over a three day old bottle of beer that was still half empty, off of my brother's bass amp that has been sitting in the middle of the entrance into the kitchen since last friday and broke a plate that was covered in dried out pasta from at least a week before. I don't drink so I'm not the one leaving bottles around the fucking flat. I am also the one that ends up doing the cooking and shopping and usually, the cleaning. I'm gonna go do two of those things now and the third tomorrow. Woo!

Hat:
Man, living in a house where nobody really cares that much about keeping it tidy is a fucking paradise. It's largely dude-centric houses that tend to fall into that trap, but you meet a few ladies, some of them of surprisingly high birth and personal cleanliness, and then you unleash them into a share house and they're building forts out of old pizza boxes and building traps for the cat using the bacon that they left defrosting for too long as bait.

I am pretty malleable when it comes to cleaning. If theres one tidy person in the house I sort of evolve into their auxiliary helping hand against the onslaught and chaos, but if we're all just a bunch of slobs I am probably the worst out of all of them.

calenlass:
If everyone else is more of a slob than I am I will, for whatever reason, be tidier and slob less than I would otherwise. I find myself doing this at some of my friends' apartments, actually, especially when they start bitching and moaning about how messy it is and then toss dirty laundry in the middle of the living room floor on top of old pizza boxes and leave extra cables strewn about and never throw away garbage like dead batteries or bits of plastic wrapping or paper bags with half-eaten krispy kreme donuts in them and then complain about the roaches and how they can never find anything.

I miss my roommate from Vietnam. She was pretty cool.

jhocking:
West Virginia beckons

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