This.
I just thought about it this way: if I leave food in my room, it’s there for a reason. This has been the case no matter the living space arrangements. Not even my parents would have thought it was okay to take it when I was a kid.
Emergency?? Did you miss the part about not having Sriracha ?
If I rented from someone* and found out they went into my private space for any reason, including closing the window, short of an emergency, I’d start looking to move out.
*I would consider it the End of Days, practically, if I had to rent a room in someone else’s house. I’ve been fortunate and never had to do that. I’d rather have the tiniest, crappiest apartment, but live on my own.
Would the owner of the home be okay with the mortgage company coming by and opening their front door? Technically they own the house, after all!
I highly doubt he’d be cool with that. And with good reason, it’s a complete violation of his privacy. Whether they touch anything or not, isn’t the issue. Nor is how trivial the reason for doing so.
It’s not right, and if he can’t see it, that’s because he chooses not to, I think.
Both posts hit on an important point: If the hypothetical “you” cooking the hypothetical chicken is technically the landlord, the law in many jurisdictions restricts your access to the tenant’s space beyond the normal bounds of “don’t be an intrusive dick.”
So, I stay out of the roomie’s space, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but it’s the law. (Maybe. IANAL, so what do I know? But it’s not worth the risk. People get snagged on technical violations of laws that don’t seem obviously applicable often enough that I don’t like the odds.)
Fighting the hypothetical a little, I’d turn off the chicken and go to the store myself. Two bottles of Sriracha are better than one.
- Don’t have roommates.
While that’s a popular meme, it’s not true. The mortgage company has a secured interest in the property and that’s definitely not the same as ownership. It does give them more rights than an unsecured creditor, but those rights basically amount to foreclosure options and preventing you from selling the house without paying them back first.
Nope. In fact, I wouldn’t even get to that point because I wouldn’t have even gotten as far as finding it. That is, this part above is already an invasion of privacy and I wouldn’t even open the door to someone’s room without his permission; he may have left something private out with the expectation that, it being in his room, would be left alone, or he simply left something out private accidentally.
In my view, there are basically just two options. One can text/call the person and ask if they bought some because you’d like to try it and, upon learning its in his room, ask for permission to retrieve it. Or just simply wait and try it some other time.
Personally, I’d just wait, not only because it avoids the whole issue, but because then there’s not even a risk of accidentally seeing anything private, even with permission to enter, and you get to have some advice from the roommates about how to prepare the dish with sriracha. Curiosity can wait; there will be plenty of other opportunities to try it.