It's hard to share space with someone else, people are messing, loud, annoying and most of all, selfish. They have no concern other than for themselves and they don't seem to care how hard it is on those around them, especially those living with them!
These roommate horror stories just might turn you off roommates for good! Communal living isn't for everybody!
They Thought They Had Such A Great Roommate, At First…
“A friend of mine needed a roommate in a house where he already held a lease.
I moved in and paid him my portion of the rent instead of adding my name to the lease. I lived there for about three months and it was great. He was always cleaning, literally always. It seemed pretty great until I came home from work one day. There was a pink note stuck to the front door that said we were being evicted because we hadn’t paid rent in three months. Turns out that cleaning was what he liked to do while high on speed.
It all worked out though. I talked with the landlady and she kicked him out and I took over the lease. She went after him for missing rent. He sobered up, moved in with family and chipped away at it until it was paid.”
“I Wouldn’t Be Surprised To Learn He Died In A House FIre”
“He’d just throw things away that didn’t belong to him. Sometimes it’d be little things like a potato peeler or a baking tray, which isn’t a huge loss but it’s a pain in the arse when you’re in the middle of cooking something and realize you don’t have it anymore. Other times it’d be a hair dryer or the cushions from the back of the sofa.
We had a Henry vacuum cleaner. When it needed emptying he just got rid of the old bag without bothering to replace it, so the next time I opened it, several months’ worth of dust flew everywhere. Another time he tried to rewire its plug, connecting neutral to live and earth to neutral, because it had stopped working and he naturally assumed this must be because someone else goes around messing with the electrical wiring.
We get a brand new washing machine and he puts so much detergent in it that foam starts spurting through the seal. Doesn’t give a solitary care.
Numerous smoke alarm activations due to putting things directly on the bottom of the oven on maximum heat, or letting pots overflow while he’s nowhere around. Once melted half a plastic spatula by leaving it on top of the stove. My room was directly above the kitchen so it’d stink of smoke after each of these incidents.
He’d leave the toilet seat covered with pee, or the toilet stuffed full of TP or once a kitchen towel. Once left his daughter’s dirty diaper right in front of the toilet in such a way that you couldn’t just step around it. Again, not a care was given.
No idea what he’s up to now, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he’s either died in a house fire or electrocuted himself due to his own incompetence.
Total Hypocrite
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“I had a clean freak roommate who was crazy. She’d literally FREAK OUT and scream and clean up after you while you were cooking. I’d cut vegetables and be putting the first part into a pan, and she’d walk over furious that I’d left the cutting board out and messy for her to clean up – I’m literally still using it! I’ll clean up when I’m done using the cutting board! She however only ate two things, chicken nuggets and popcorn.
WHICH SHE NEVER CLEANED UP AFTER.
She cooked the chicken nuggets on the same baking sheet every day. And when it was so caked in nugget residue it would burn in the oven, she’d put a layer of tin foil over it and cook on that. And then when that layer was gross, instead of removing the tin foil layer, she’d add more tin foil over the top!
When she moved out, she left the pan in the drawer under the stove covered in six layers of greasy burnt crumbed chicken nuggets. She couldn’t stand me not cleaning a cutting board of vegetables halfway through cooking them, but apparently, a baking sheet covered in three months of chicken grease and crumbs can go back in the drawer?
She also made herself popcorn every night and then left the uncleaned pot on the stove all the time. That pot was never cleaned.
She did this before she’d go to bed at 7 pm. She’s had the same bedtime since she was a child. She never went to bed after 8 pm. If you made it past 9 without waking her up though, she was a sound sleeper and the noise level wouldn’t wake her.
She would invite her nieces over with no warning. So I was working retail at the time and had just worked an inventory until 4 am. I got home and at 6 am she and her nieces aged 6 and 9 started playing games that involved shrieking. We’d never have any idea children were even in the apartment until the morning activities and she would get furious at us for implying we’d like them to keep it down until 8 or 9 because ‘this is just as much her place as ours and she can do whatever she wants!’ However, if we had anyone stay for more than two hours she’d ask us to pay a higher share of the rent because they now counted as an additional resident of the apartment and we needed to be responsible for the burden.
She’d watch TV in her room with the door open, and get mad if you made too much noise in the living room on the other end of the house while she was watching. But she would never change the volume, or close the door. If she couldn’t hear, she’d lecture you about roommate respect and watching the volume instead of shutting the door and turning the volume up a small smidgen.
Remember when I said she was a total neat freak and would walk around the kitchen cleaning up after you while you were still using items to cook? She made a big deal about how the cleanliness of the kitchen was of the utmost importance. I got off work two hours early one day and walked in and what did I find her doing? Cutting someone’s hair IN THE KITCHEN! There was hair all over the stove, counter, and floor. Vegetables are a kitchen abomination, but she cuts people’s hair in there twice a week and doesn’t think it’s a big deal at all.
I still hate her guts.”
When In Doubt, Deny Everything
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“I got a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue for my birthday from a friend. I went out of town. Roommate proceeds to drink half the bottle and then fill it up with water like I wouldn’t notice. And then had the audacity to lie about it, and continues to til this day. I do believe he doesn’t remember though. He got laid off after getting arrested for drinking and driving. Proceeded to drink himself stupid for eight months and was eventually taking our rent money to pay his car bill. Didn’t realize until we had an eviction notice. Forced him to get his parents to pay for our three months of rent he didn’t pay, but I still have an eviction on my record. I have a copy of the notice that says I was not evicted, so wherever I go, I have to show that to future landlords or when I buy a house so we don’t get denied.”
Clean Your Own Crap
“I felt like a jerk writing notes to my former housemate, but I had no choice. He paid rent and had a room in our house but spent all of his time at his girlfriend’s. He would come to ‘our’ home to cook his meals (which were one of three options every time – chicken tenders, plain pasta, or frozen pizzas) and then would leave the dishes undone in the sink or his bedroom, once to the point (while I wasn’t there to tidy up after him) where the metal tray eroded the sink.
I cannot tell you how many times I had to wrestle his door open, climb through piles of damp, sweaty, rugby gear, rescue whatever cutlery that had amassed there and then spend hours scrubbing the caked on dried chocolate milkshake from our glasses. None of this, I felt, deserved a passive-aggressive note, other than one above the sink that said: ‘Please do your own dishes!’
However, when he bought food and left it in his cupboard to ROT and MOULD and STINK, I finally reached the end of my tether. I cannot abide unnecessary food waste. The note on his cupboard read along the lines of: ‘Something in here is messed up to the point where I WILL NOT clean it for you. This needs immediate attention and if it happens again I will remove the offending item and place it in your bed.’ He texted a half-sincere apology the next day, explaining that he had bought and consumed half a child’s birthday cake and then left the rest to decay. Two months later, when we realized he had left a cup half full of chocolate shake on the kitchen counter, I did put it in his bedroom. He stopped coming home at all, until after I had moved out.
I still feel some resentment. My living situation improved – I had two very clean housemates and now I live alone. Forget that.”
Deadbeat Gonna Deadbeat
“I rented a house with three friends, and one of them only put down 150 of the initial 600 dollars we would each need for the deposit with promises he would pay us back. We were desperate for a place so we agreed to help him out.
I was there roughly a month, he paid bills on time and was starting to pay us back. All was good. Then one weekend my boyfriend and I were out of town for the night. The day we got back, his room was completely empty. We were like, what the… and tried to call and text to no avail. None of his friends knew, our other roommate didn’t know, everyone was in shock.
Eventually, we got a response from him. It was this huge wall of text in an attempt to get pity from us since he couldn’t handle adult responsibility and couldn’t afford rent and bills (he worked full time, I was working about 25 hours a week and was fine, plus he ate out every meal) and also said he couldn’t handle the allergies from my cat, which he knew about for many months prior to moving in. So he just decided to up and move out without telling anyone and expected us to be okay with it.
Um, no. Handling extra expenses out of the blue like that is not going to happen. We argued for about a week after that, got the landlord involved, and at the end we knew it wasn’t worth it to fight any more so we asked if he could simply pay the rent for that month since he was there well over half of it. Instead of doing the responsible thing and keeping this matter between who it concerned, he went on Facebook and delivered a huge sob story painting us to be the bad guys and in turn got many of my friends upset with me, for some reason.
In the end we didn’t get that last rent payment and I lost quite a few friends. Last I heard he is living with his abusive mother he constantly badmouthed and complained about which makes perfect sense.”
Poor Judge Of Character
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“It was my first apartment and I wasn’t a good judge of roommate character back then. I was working at a welding shop and had befriended this guy after driving him home from work.
Naturally, we thought it would be a good idea to move in together at my place to cut down on expenses. Little did I know, he was one of those drinkers that blackout and destroy everything. Each day after work was him with a 30-pack, getting in arguments with kids in Yahoo! chat rooms over a mic until he would pass out.
It escalated.
He quit going to work and I’d come home with him passed out, vomit all over the floors, urine in the corners, half-eaten pizza covering his face down on the couch, the works. I started telling him he needed to leave, but he wasn’t hearing it. Eventually, he got arrested for something and ended up in jail. I was free. For a while.
He got out and I woke to banging on my door. I didn’t let him in (his mom collected all his things when he got locked up).
Fast forward to recently, I’d been overseas for 6 years and moved back to my home state afterward, and recently stumbled across his Facebook page after not having seen or heard from him in 13 years. We talked. He’s doing really well now, training to be an addiction counselor, and I’m happy for him.”
She’s The One They Warned You About
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“My first roommate in college was a nightmare. She’d party all night and then wake me up at 4 am when she got in to see if she got any phone calls (this was before cell phones were common, but our college phones had voicemail). It was a dry campus, and she would drink all the time in the dorm and leave bottles and cans all over the place. I drank too, but I at least had the common sense to hide the bottles! She’d come back from sorority parties trashed and expected me to take care of her. It came to a head when I went back home for the weekend, and, when I got back, saw she had put a leaky McDonald’s cup on my brand new laptop. Who knows how long it had been sitting there. I told her I was going down to the student life office to see about getting my own dorm. It was worth the extra fee to live alone. Luckily there was an empty dorm on the same floor I had been on and was able to move there. I went back to my dorm to start packing up, and the jerk had already moved all of my stuff out into the hallway! I hadn’t even told her I was able to move out yet! Turns out, she wasn’t cut out for college, anyway. She dropped out after one year. One of my last memories of her in the dorms was in the spring. She had gotten her tongue pierced and went tanning. The next day she was lobster red and her tongue was swollen so bad she couldn’t close her mouth. She was shuffling down the hallway trying not to move too much, and her mouth was hanging open.”
Freeloaders Not Welcome
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“I lived with a roommate who was a complete and total narcissist. It was a $1500/mo apartment (three bedrooms in a nice part of town) that should have been $500 a person, but he was a lazy person and maybe contributed ~$150 of that. His dumb girlfriend wasn’t much better, contributing about the same amount per month, but she was at least more pleasant to talk to.
I lived with them for about six months and paid the $1200 I was paying to cover the rent because I didn’t want my credit to take the hit that would result from an eviction.
The whole time, they were going out to eat at nice places all the time; meanwhile, I never could do anything because I was burning up all my cash just trying to cover the rent.
Of course I would talk to the dude saying, ‘Man, this can’t continue, it’s stressing me out, I can’t afford to buy food most of the time,’ but since he was a narcissist, he would turn the argument around to somehow make it about how ungrateful a person I was.
The end finally came when I spoke with the leasing office and explained that, while I loved the apartment, I was the only one who was really giving the property managers any real money and the situation was untenable. I also said I would love to continue doing business with them (possibly with a smaller apartment), but I was locked into my lease and couldn’t afford to pay an early termination fee because these jerks I lived with were sucking me dry.
They looked up the paperwork and said, ‘Well it looks like only [narcissistic roommate] filled out lease paperwork, so you have no legal obligation to pay the rent.’
‘Is that so?’ I responded. I thought for a few moments and then said to the agent, ‘You should probably get eviction paperwork ready for next month. I have no intention of continuing to fund their lavish lifestyle. What other units do you have?’ I went back to the apartment and began packing.
One day, they came home to see that my bedroom was empty and my car was gone. They started packing like crazy for the next three days, having to throw a lot of it away because they were going to get locked out before they could get it all. On the second day, the power was turned off, because it was in my name at the old apartment and now that I had my own place I wasn’t about to pay for the power in two different places. So they had to frantically pack, in the sweltering July heat, in total darkness.
Eff those people.”
That’ll Show Her!
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“A friend of mine had a pretty rough time on her first week of living in a new place with a bunch of guys.
She originally wanted to rent with her friend, but, unfortunately, her friend pulled out of the university course at the local university they were attending together, so she ended up having to find somewhere to rent alone. She ended up renting a room in a house share with four other guys (also students). After the first week, she informed them she was going to the store and they asked her to pick up some toilet paper for the house. Unfortunately she forgot and they were pretty upset about it.
So the next day, after being out of the house all day, she came home to find her bedroom walls and bed sheets smeared in poop. It was their idea of teaching her a lesson about forgetting to get toilet paper. She stayed with her boyfriend immediately after that, but I’m pretty sure she still paid rent there until someone else rented the room.”
Who’s Nightmare Was It?
“So it’s literally the first night we are sleeping in the same dorm room, so things are already a little awkward since we only know each other’s names. But night falls and we go to sleep.
I wake up to the sound of her yelling, ‘NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOO,’ and then she flings all of her blankets off of her bed and onto the floor. At this point, I’m freaked out, so I ask if she’s okay and she doesn’t reply. Instead, she sits up and looks around, sees the window and kind of whispers, ‘Not the window…’ Then she stands up and walks to the window. At this point, I realize she must be sleepwalking, or crazy. She gets to the window, grabs the lock with both hands and locks and unlocks the window over and over again while whispering to herself. She never opened it, but after about three minutes of that, she lets go and says, ‘That’ll do.’ And then starts walking back to her bed, but when she was passing by my bed, she stopped and turned to face me. Then she just stood there, asleep (I hope), staring at me for a good two minutes. Then she started whispering to herself again, walked past her bed to the door, dragged her hand down the middle of it, turned around and walked to her bed and laid down.
I was terrified, but I never told her about it. She never did it again.”
Never Live With The Ex
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“Up until this past April, my boyfriend and I shared a two-bedroom apartment with his brother and his brother’s EX-girlfriend.
Originally, it was myself, my boyfriend, and his brother, but we let the ex in because she had lost her job as a live-in home health aide and was on the verge of being homeless.
We were all friendly at first; I drove her stuff from the next state over to our apartment.
Not too long after that, she started berating my boyfriend’s brother over stuff that was beyond his control, and it wasn’t long before that anger shifted to me and my boyfriend as well. She also had a hard time paying rent, and when I say ‘had a hard time,’ I mean ‘spending her money from both jobs on useless crap from eBay.’ Her rent was the same as mine: $160 a month, cheap as both my boyfriend and his brother drive school buses and make a decent amount and could really support the apartment themselves. I had to bust my tail working in a grocery store to make rent while the ex barely paid a dime.
It got to the point where she complained about every little thing, whether it was our fault or not. Our friend literally had to move in and basically keep us from killing each other; I swung at her for calling me fat, even though she looks like Humpty-Dumpty.
In the meantime, she started bringing random guys in and out of the house. One guy, in particular, only visited whenever my boyfriend and his brother were out of the house; turns out the guy was a registered offender and had been busted for kiddie stuff and she ‘forgot’ to tell us. It was a long year before we finally went our separate ways and cleansed ourselves of the apartment.
My boyfriend and I moved into our own place, his brother moved in with his parents, and the ex wound up living out of her car after getting kicked out of the offender’s house AND her grandparents’ house. We made it clear that after the way she treated us, we would have no part in getting her on her feet again.”
Oh…That’s Bad…It Wasn’t Even Him!
“First year of college.
My two roommates got a major kick out of yelling weird stuff down at people as they walked by our top floor dorm. It was usually pretty harmless, if probably pretty annoying/confusing for the people on the receiving end. Anyway, as guilty as I was of laughing about it, I never participated and did a lot of eye rolling at them.
One day they were doing this, and I went to take a shower. When I got back the dorm was empty. Didn’t think anything of it, thought they must have grabbed lunch.
Soon there is a knock on the door. Still in my towel, I open the door, expecting the roommates or friends from down the hall. Nope. Four hugely ticked off black guys.
Wonderful.
They want to know who has something to say. Who’s got the big balls now, say that stuff to their face.
Oh god, they didn’t…
Yep, they did.
So now I’m a white dude in a towel, and these four dudes have been hate-crimed. I swear up and down I didn’t do it, that I wouldn’t do that, and that they’re more than welcome to hang out until my roommates got back, who will surely offer them the apology they’re entitled to.
But they were too ticked. They called me everything. They didn’t believe me at all. They said I was hiding in the shower and all this. I’ve never felt so awful in my life.
And nothing ever happened. I cussed my roommates out huge, but that was it. One of the dudes saw me later in the year and, sort of condescendingly I think, gave me a ‘last chance’ to be the bigger man and confess. I told him again it wasn’t me, that it was the roommates. I put my hand out for a shake, but he declined and made fun of me about hiding in the shower again.
Still bummed it happened.”