I’ve only been living out of home for 3 years (and back at home for portions of that), yet I somehow always move in with shitfaces. They could be the not-clean-the-house kind, or the you-can’t-do-that kind, but I seem to have encountered them all.
I first moved out of home just after I turned 18. I had my license and a full time job so I was all set. At this time I was a hardcore vegan and decided I only wanted to live with people like me so I started searching for all vegan households.
I found one near the city, and decided to go in and have a look. Mum came with me, partly so she could direct me and partly so she could suss the situation out, as she wasn’t particularly pleased with my decision to move.
Upon arrival, we decided the place was an epic dump. The people living there weren’t bothering to maintain the yard and the inside was stacked with their accumulated crap. If that hadn’t already made me decide against it, the bedroom for rent concreted my decision to get the hell out of there. It was TINY, and since someone was still living in the room at the time, it was also piled high with shit.
Ma and I made our excuses and left.
This put a damper on my whole ‘living with fellow vegans’ dream, because if that house was any indication, all vegans (apart from myself of course) were disgusting slobs who didn’t bother to clean, and probably didn’t shave their armpits.
I kept looking for rooms to rent, but looked for ‘normal’ sharehouses. The next house I came across ended up being ‘the one’. It was a four bedroom house in a good location and because there were already three others living there, it was cheap too. It wasn’t particularly clean, but people seemed to keep to their rooms so I went for it.
On the day I arrived to move everything in, the carpet in my room was filthy and obviously hadn’t been vacuumed for my arrival. This really pissed Ma off, but I shrugged it off because of how excited I was about moving out.
Everything was moved in by the afternoon and Ma and my brothers went home. The first thing I noticed was that there was no toilet paper. There was only ONE toilet in the house, so this disturbed the shit out of me. How long had they been without toilet paper? Were they fighting about who had to buy it? HOW DID THEY WIPE THEIR BITS? Like seriously, it’s not like your bowels or bladder are on a timer and go off at the same time every day. What if one of them had to shit, right in the middle of this war? Did they use a tea towel? Or did they just go in the backyard and use a leaf?
I was out the door like a shot. I had to buy some toilet paper and I had to buy it FAST.
When I came home from my voyage to the shops, I stocked the toilet with toilet paper and then retreated to my room. My room was in a pretty bad corner of the house. One wall backed onto the back steps (the steps the security guard housemate used when he came home at 4am) and the toilet was right next to another wall. This meant that I could hear EVERYTHING any of my housemates did in that toilet, which was especially revolting early in the morning when the boys would go for a marathon piss.
I stayed there for about a month. Every afternoon when I would come home, I’d get changed and run off to the gym straight away so I wouldn’t have to see anyone. When I got back from the gym, I’d hide in my room and watch DVDs, which is pretty much what I do anyway, but I had different reasons for it then.
The woman that owned the house was a delightful lady. Her son lived in the house (in the master bedroom, of course) and he walked around like his shit didn’t stink. He was an ugly bastard, smelt like an old man’s room, and would talk down to everyone. His mum would come over most weekends so that she could do his washing for him. It’s not like we didn’t have a washing machine, because we did, so it was an odd situation. She’d do his washing and then come upstairs and clean his dishes, mop and vacuum the entire house and mow the back lawn. He would have been about 21, so it made no sense to me for her to do that. He treated her like shit too. Always scowling and telling her she hadn’t done enough. It was revolting.
I didn’t really know any of the other people that lived there until Hamid moved in a week or so after me. He was the security guard for a club in the city and would trump up the stairs at 4am every morning, always managing to wake me up no matter how quiet he was. He’d wander into the kitchen while I was making dinner and we’d chat about his job, my tattoos and the situation with his crazy girlfriend. He was the only one in the house that I enjoyed living with.
As I said, I only stayed for about a month, as Ma had been secretly looking for other places for me to live because she hated me living in that ‘disgusting’ house. She found me a place closer to the city, in a three bedroom apartment with a 30 something divorcee. When I left the sharehouse, Hamid promised to keep in contact (which he did for a while). The day before I moved out, the owner of the house came around to give me my bond back. She sat me down at the dining room table, and her son followed. He sat there giving me dirty looks, and when his mother pushed the money from my bond down the table at me, he snatched them up.
“What are you doing? You can’t give her this! I need it for myself this week. You told me you’d give it to me.”
At this point I was panicking that I wouldn’t get my bond back. I needn’t have worried though, as his mother took the money off him and gave it to me before telling him that she’d give him money later. I began breathing again, and took off to my room as soon as I could, but not before the landlady sadly told me that I was the best tenant she’d ever had, and she was sorry to see me go. I felt so horrible. She always came up and had a chat with me whenever she visited, and I could tell she was lonely and relished those moments. I didn’t want to let her down, but I wasn’t comfortable in that house so it was for the best.
The next day I made my pilgrimage to the new apartment.
Thus ends part 1 of the saga. Part 2 to come soon.
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