For the seventh time in nine years, I have moved. This time, it was because the house became a commune style flophouse. The basement and storage closet were illegally sublet, the neighborhood crazy homeless guy picked up his mail there, one housemate went crazy with chalkboard paint in every common room, and when I returned my key there was a chalkboard message on the door inviting everyone who passed by to a weekly vegan potluck. Oh, and the doorknob was missing. And their rent was late every month.
Or there was the two room apartment with one interior door shared with another person and a cat. With Astroturf carpet and a hallway that was a kitchen. And roaches. And (shudder) bedbugs.
Or the one my friend just moved out of- middle aged guy who rented only to young females, painted every common area bright green and moved in his semi girlfriend who refused to go outside after dark and accused her dog of being neurotic.
Have any housing stories of horror or just plain weirdness? Post them here!
[ul]
I once lived with my ex-wife and her new boyfriend, less than a year after our divorce[/ul]
[ul]Lived out of my car for about 6 months (I was employed and showered daily at the university’s Arts & Architecture building)[/ul]
[ul]Rented a room that was smaller than many walk-in closets: barely had space for a twin mattress and 2 bags of clothes, nothing else[/ul]
[ul]In same house as above, rented a bigger room that was the band practice room…members of 3 different bands lived in the house, so chaos was nonstop[/ul]
[ul]Lived almost 2 years in a 1BR apt. with my girlfriend, my best friend, 2 lesbians, 5 cats, and various people sleeping on our couches nearly every night[/ul]
When I was in grad school, I rented a large farm house on 80 acres a land for $300 a month. I had housemates that used it as a weekend ski place but they were only there some weekends during the winter and the rest of the time it was just me. No phone, no mailing address, and no neighbors for any reasonable distance. I didn’t even have a key to it. It was always open. The design of the house was beyond strange as well and spooky as hell. There were these Scooby Doo looking paintings all over the place. The warmest you could get it in the winter was 50 degrees with the furnace running full blast because the part of the house my bedroom was in was uninsulated. I have no idea what I would have done if I got hurt or someone broke in or even if my car wouldn’t start. I guess dying would be the only real option. I loved it there though.
Here’s a few hints to running your own communal flophouse:
You must keep a 5:1 occupant to bedroom ratio. Preferably people who don’t shower, because it’s broken.
No doors, only dirty blankets and curtains allowed. I assume this is so you can hear the various disgusting people having sex on that sagging waterbed.
People don’t own things, they just enjoy them briefly until someone pawns them for drug money.
Part of a residents duties are to invite skevy friends to stay, for months at a time. Bonus points if they have obnoxious pets that need a place to stay.
If you ever have a housemate who has a suspicious aversion to letting anyone look in their room, this is because their room is disgustingly filthy. I’ve had two housemates like this - you never saw them with their door open; they would close it just to go to the kitchen for a minute and then come back, struggling with the doorknob while trying to balance plates and cutlery, rather than let the rest of us look in their room. We used to sneak peeks in there when they weren’t home. You couldn’t see the floor. At all. Her room stank of urine. His room had rat shit all over the bed. :eek:
When they decided to actually bring a plate or two back to the kitchen (most of the plates never returned from their room…), they’d just dump it on the counter and leave it there for 2 weeks, unrinsed, until it stank like anything and you could no longer tell what used to be in it. One time she even emerged from her room, noticed the smell and said “hmm…I think I’ll take the trash out.” So she took the bin out from under the sink, left it in the middle of the kitchen floor and promptly walked away. :dubious:
She invited her sister and 2 of her sister’s friends to stay with us for 2 weeks (no need for the extra beds, you see - they could just sleep comfortably on all the clothes and junk covering the floor :p). They didn’t even use the bin - all of them just started dumping their trash in a corner of the kitchen til we had a pile of rubbish 3 feet high (not even kidding) in the corner.
I’m pretty sure she never even showered. She’d get up early and we’d hear her leave the house without going into the bathroom at all first. Then come home late at night and once again, go straight to bed without showering. Not sure if she smelled - it was hard to tell because we rarely saw her. We could be home all day, not hear a sound from her room and think she wasn’t home - then she’d mysteriously emerge at like 3pm. And most disconcerting of all, I never ever saw her once without this (discolored) white bandanna that she refused to take off, ever.
Rented a room with my girlfriend, sharing a small apartment with another couple. She got up at 5am and put the radio on full blast “because I can’t wake up any other way”. We asked her not to and she refused. She was on some form of cabbage soup diet and boiled cabbage most of the time she was home.
She was a pain in the arse, but she was at least square.
Her boyfriend was a different matter. He had a large supply of LSD and a drink problem. One night he was tripping and drunk, and came into our room when we were getting undressed for bed. He started stroking my girlfriend’s leg saying “pretty girl, sweet pussy” then picked me up (he was a huge guy) and dragged me, kicking, to a bar a few yards away, just in my boxer shorts. In fairness he bought me a drink but I was standing in a crowded fucking bar in just my underwear. I waited until he was distracted, ran home, we got dressed and stayed at a friend’s place until we could find somewhere else.
Months later I bumped into the girl and she seemed to have intuited there was a problem, because the first thing she told me was that he’d admitted himself into a mental hospital.
I think my wierdest was when I lived with two roommates. We didn’t like each other touching are stuff, so we all padlocked our bedroom doors when we were out. Somehow we thought this was normal.
I came home one night to find my roommates in a bit of a fluster. When they got home some other guys were waiting for them, supposedly with weapons. The thieves took TV sets and stereo equipment and tore the phone out of the wall. But they didn’t touch my stuff because my room was locked!
As a grad student, I rented a room in a townhouse from a loopy woman and her trucker husband.
I think the first thing she ever said to me was “Are you a cop? You have to tell me if you are.” It turned out that she was asking because she would roll joints for her quadriplegic friend who was a drug dealer. Other typical comments (her voice had only one volume - shouting):
[ul][li]Oh Danny, you and your Paki jokes![/li][li]Saskatchewan, is that in Alberta? Is that a dumb question? Sorry, I fried my brain with pot in high school.[/li][li]Better to rob the cradle than rob the grave![/li][li]Why don’t you f*** her Danny, you f***ed all my other friends! Ha ha ha![/li][li]I might be moving slow for a little while, since I just had surgery on my asshole![/ul][/li]
On one occasion, her husband found a dead moose on the highway at one point and he brought it home with him. After they had it butchered, they cooked up a roast but it didn’t taste that great (IMO).
There was also a German grad student living in the same house. One time he cooked a dish for us he called “banana pan”; the ingredients were pork medallions, bananas, whipping cream and ketchup. Also not that great (IMO).
None of my living arrangements have been exceptionally strange compared to those already discussed, but you might want to check out “He Died With a Felafel In His Hand” by John Birmingham. It’s an account of his days living in share houses around Brisbane in the late 80’s-early 90’s. Heard they made a movie about it too (haven’t seen it).
Back when I was doing my first year of teaching and they told me I had to rent in the town the school was in or I’d be fired…where there was limited rental opportunities…and before I told them to F off and fire me because I am going to get a real apartment in the next town over…
I lived in a basement apartment, fully furnished, all utilities paid…for $100 a month.
I was overcharged. However, it was the only one available. The other one wanted way more than I could afford.
It was crickets in the Fall and spiders in the Spring. I would come home and there would be a spider on every square foot wall of the place. I didn’t even kill many of them because I was THANKFUL they were there because sleeping was hell in the Fall because of the crickets. Those crickets got into everything and crickets are DISGUSTING.
The shower was disgusting and had hot water for about 30 sec. I would have to time jumping in, quick hair shampoo and jump out.
The refrigerator went out in December and was never replaced. I stopped using the stove after a cricket incident and a fire (unrelated).
The poor landlord and his wife…were elderly…and the guy was severely infected with shingles. I mean BAD. He was in bad shape pain wise and went into surgery to have nerves cut or something so that there was no pain. That seemed to work out…but I am still haunted by my last time with him…drinking beers and him saying to me in a horrified voice…that he thought the pain was coming back. 3 months later he committed suicide (I was living elsewhere at the time).
The wife was a hoarder and kept trying to ‘store’ things in my apartment.
Damn…I look back. Holy hell!
I told the school admin I was getting a real apt in a neighboring city next year and if they wanted to fire me then just not renew my contract. They let me do it (because, frankly, I was damn good )
I rent 2 rooms from an ex g/f. My current g/f is now living with me. My relationship with current g/f is complicated, but stable. Ex g/f thinks im nuts because of the complications of current g/f which ex g/f knows about from listening to me grouse about it before new g/f ended up moving in with me.
I didn’t rent it, but one of the places I looked at when I was in grad school for Chemistry in Miami required housemates to be vegan, smelled of several kinds of incense as well as pot, did not have any horizontal furniture (shelves and closets, yes - beds, chairs or tables, no), and every book in sight was from the New Age store.
It looked pretty nice within the “India exploded here” decorating style, but I suggested stating their vegan requirement in the ad. I think it was the first time I’d encountered the word; the owner was so used to people not knowing it that she explained it automatically (take into account that the % of foreigners in Miami is huge).
Did not live there, but the local hospital has a kind of “on-duty” which does not require people covering it to be at the hospital, but they must be within 30 minutes of it. People who live further apart pool together to rent a flat; the highest occupancy I’ve heard of within this system was 24 people, only they were never all in the flat at the same time.
I worked at a very large amusement park in Ohio while I was in college. The amusement park is on an island, which isn’t a true island because it’s connected to mainland by a causeway (which I think is man-made). The amusement park offered dorm living out on the point (the “island” part) and also apartments on the mainland part. They also offered a shuttle bus for employees going back and forth from the apartments to the park, which ran every few minutes. The park would take $15 per week out of your check for your rent.
The apartments had five bedrooms and two bathrooms, each with two showers in them. They had bunk beds in each of the bedrooms, so conceivably, you could have 14 roommates at any given time, which I did, for most of the summer. People would move out, move in, wander through, crash there for one night. Random women would walk into my apartment and I’d have to ask “Do you live here or are you visiting someone?” The phone rang CONSTANTLY, 24/7. I once got tired of some girl’s boyfriend letting the phone ring 100+ times until somebody answered, so I got out of bed at 3 a.m., ripped the phone out of the wall and threw it in the trash. Nobody said a word to me about that. I hated answering the phone because someone would ask for “Christie” and you’d have to bang on four other doors to find out if someone named Christie lives there. There was a common kitchen area, which was clean for about the first two days of the summer. After that, nobody washed a single dish for the rest of the summer. My roommate and I (we only had two in our room) kept all our groceries locked in our bedroom closet. If you left something out in the common areas, you might never see it again. That includes personal toiletries left in the bathroom. Most of the time, I ate in the employee cafeteria, which was dirt cheap and offered pretty good food.
Most of us worked 10-14 hours a day and partied all night, going on maybe a 3-4 hours sleep all summer long, so the situation was actually more tolerable than it might sound because most of us were either working, out, or sleeping. I don’t recall hanging around the apartment very much. I don’t think there was a TV, or if there was, I never had the time to sit down and watch and we probably didn’t have cable anyway. All the girls in these places ranged in age from 18-23 or so, so the traffic in and out of there was constant and I don’t think there was a single girl there who only dated one boy at a time. I think we all had at least two or three on the hook at any given time; the boys were the same way.
I could never live that way now – not even knowing the names of all the people I live with – but it was hella fun back in the day. I’d totally do it again if I were 20 and needed a fun summer gig. Fun job, constant partying, surrounded by like-minded people my own age.
My ex still lives in my garage. My fiancee and I never see him - I don’t get why people think it’s so weird. He pays rent, and it isn’t like it’s an attached garage.
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