Moving into a share house often comes with a decent amount of anxiety, mostly because you have no idea what you’re moving into until it’s sometimes too late.
For starters, playing house with a set of strangers holds a lot more ‘unknowns’ than moving in with your mates, but even getting a place with your most compatible pals might not work out quite as planned.
New research completed by realestate.com.au found that, of the 44% of millennials who have opted to move in with people they already know, 2/5 admitted they’ve lost a friendship from living together.
That’s because, when you’re around someone all the time, you often see parts of their personality that you didn’t know existed – the good, the bad and the ugly. While the ‘good’ definitely exists, it’s the ‘ugly’ housemate horror stories that bring us, renters, together.
In fact, we’d go so far as to say having a few housemate horror stories in the bank is basically a rite of rental passage.
Here we round up 10 next-level, cringe-worthy tales to make you feel that bit better about your own living situation.
1. First up is this scarring ordeal:
“Until recently I was living with two housemates I’d never met before moving in and everything was friendly…until the lease was about to end. One of the housemates went seriously weird. I’m talking refusing to pay rent but not moving out, demanding to move out without replacing himself despite only three weeks remaining on the lease, refusing to leave when we gave in and were willing to pay his rent to get him out of there, rubbing my toothbrush in something yellow, demanding to keep a larger portion of the (tiny!) amount of money we made from selling unclaimed house furniture and had agreed to spend on end of lease cleaning, plus constantly insulting, threatening and accusing myself and my other housemate. Textbook narcissist.” – Allegra, 24
2. Then there’s this ~nasty~ bathroom encounter:
“This one time my housemate had a bender, and I woke up to poo on the floor of the bathroom. He was a party boy and didn’t clean it for 24 hours…then I had a date coming over so I had to clean it myself.” – Adam, 26
3. Well, this would definitely leave a bad taste in your mouth:
“I vacated my last place about two weeks earlier than my other housemates but, because I lived the closest, I was asked to let the end of lease cleaners in. I walked down from my new place in my pyjamas to let them in, only to find that my old housemates had left a bunch of crap in the cupboards and one of them had even left her giant bed and a bunch of bulky tables. The cleaners refused to start until I got rid of everything, so I spent six hours in my pyjamas cleaning up the junk and paying literally hundreds of dollars to get all the waste removed. When I asked the housemate who’d left the most behind to pitch in with the costs, she accused me of ‘just being jealous’, that she’d ‘never met anyone so rude in her life’ and that ‘it’s all part of living in sharehouses’, before blocking me.” – Emily, 24
4. This is one intense way to ask/tell someone to move out:
“I was in Japan and when I came home my housemates (who were a couple) had packed all my things up and said they’d like to me to move out so they can live together alone… We all used to be good mates but, when I came back, they started accusing me of all these things out of the blue, like leaving my cat there for them to take care of (even though I offered my mum to take her), saying that I was messy and never cleaned, despite it actually the unemployed boyfriend who always left the place in a mess.” – Kate, 26
5. Cleaning out your closet never smelt this bad:
“One of my mates stayed over at this girl’s house just hours after they first met. He woke in the middle of the night with a mighty full bladder and urinated in her wardrobe thinking it was the bathroom door he had opened. The worst part was that her entire makeup collection was on the floor in her wardrobe and the makeup bag was legit filled to the brim with urine – rank. I don’t think there were any more sleepovers after that.” – Jessica, 22
6. Then there’s this uninvited bedfellow:
“I came home one Friday night after work drinks to find the front door wide open. I thought we were being robbed so, key in hand, I walked cautiously through the house, only to find my housemate stark naked and sprawled across my bed. We had just recently moved into the house and in her drunk state had opted out of her blow up mattress.” – Sophie, 26
7. Meet the inconvenient chef:
“I had a really grubby housemate a few years ago. She did lots of little gross things – like leave fake tan stains around the bath and leave heaps of dirty plates in her bedroom – but the clincher was when she offered to cook a housemate dinner. She was reheating taco mince and started stirring it with her finger! She kept licking her hand and then using it again to test the food – it was repulsive to watch. From that day on, whenever she offered to cook, we would all fake having dinner with our parents so we would be out of the house.” – Zara, 29
8. Sharing is caring, but only if you know about it:
“I was living in a share house with a bunch of strangers and one time, when I arrived back from an overseas trip to visit my family, I walked into the lounge room and there was a guy sitting on the couch. When I started speaking to him he told me he was staying in one of the rooms upstairs. When I asked ‘which one?’ he replied ‘the one on the left, just at the top of the stairs’. That was my room. Then another one of my housemates came home and it turns out she’d been letting out my room on Airbnb whenever I went away, without asking, and didn’t even give me any of the money she got from it!” – James, 23
9. Get a room – and oh yeah, don’t forget to close the door:
“I was sitting home alone, just minding my business by watching some Netflix in the lounge, when my housemate came home with their date. The pair stayed and chatted for a while before heading upstairs to his bedroom. My show then finished and I could just hear them talking in his room, but then they started hardcore making out and I could hear everything because he left the door wide open. It wasn’t long before things sounded seriously frisky but then I realised I needed to go upstairs to my room to get something. The bad thing was, my room was right across the corridor to his. So I decided to loudly clatter pans in the kitchen, a lame attempt to remind them they weren’t home alone. Eventually, they ended up closing the door and I returned to my room, but my god it was awkward.” – Louise, 26
