26.04.18
Brooke Robinson‘s Good Cook. Friendly. Clean. follows Sandra (played by Tara Morice) as she spirals down a rabbit hole of ridiculous sharehouse interviews in the daunting midst of the Sydney housing crisis.
In anticipation of the show’s opening, we asked you to send in your own personal experiences with horrible housemates. Follow this blog post as we add stories and tidbits ranging from the hilarious to the truly heinous–and if you’ve got your own, there’s still time to submit! Email [email protected] and you might see your story published on the Griffin website!
Dairy Dilemma
“I lived with a woman in Glebe called Sam. Sam had a penchant for leaving refrigerated items out on the kitchen bench for ridiculous lengths of time. The record was a two-litre carton of milk, which was left on the bench long enough to swell to almost double in size, and turn to a festering green colour. Yummy.”
Boozy Bedfellows
“I had a flatmate who would routinely come home drunk in the early hours of the morning and leave the front door wide open. The best night was when I came downstairs to find the contents of her handbag distributed along the path leading to the front door – sunglasses, make-up, lipstick etc. She’d managed to get the door open, left it open, and then promptly dropped her keys, wallet and the bag itself in the hall before going to bed.
This was only topped by the night she climbed into my bed at 3am, declaring that she wanted to sleep there. I thought the best course of action was to go and sleep in hers – only to be confronted by her in the morning, demanding to know what I was doing in her bed.”
Chicken Feet Friends
“I moved to a new city and ended up in a house full of creative artists. It wasn’t rare to walk out of my bedroom in the morning to find strangers filming music videos in the lounge room, strangers drilling holes into slime covered dildos on the kitchen floor, or finding mannequins dressed as 16th-century witches, complete with necklaces of dried chicken feet opposite my bedroom door.”
Shower Showdown
“I moved into student accommodation and my roommate had hair about three feet long that used to block up the drain. One day the shower was so clogged that by the time I got out, there was about half a foot of water in there. Not wanting to pull HER hair out of the drain, I got out and left it – only to come home that evening to find a passive-aggressive note addressed to me, asking me to drain the shower after I use it.
On the day I moved in, I asked if there was a rubbish bin in the kitchen and she looked at me like I was crazy and just shrugged. And she once left hard boiled eggs sitting on the kitchen table going bad for a whole week.”
Meat & Greet
“My partner lived with a guy called Stu who was from country Victoria. About once a month, Stu would go home for a visit and when he returned on the Sunday night, he brought with him a cow’s carcass. The carcass was never completely dried out, so he hung it under the stairs inside the house until all the blood drained out of it… once dried (some time later), he proceeded to cut the carcass into steaks for the household for the next month.”
Smells Fishy
“In first year uni I lived with a girl who only cooked smoked cod with white sauce or macaroni cheese. That was it. Week days was smoked cod and she had the macaroni cheese for a treat on weekends. Our whole house smelt like a mix of a bad fish shop and some cheap fromagerie! At the end of first year she moved on to Kraft cheese on toast and mandarins which was much easier for the rest of us to live with!”
Coital Conundrum
“I was running late one morning and couldn’t find my bike lock. Noticing that my housemate’s door was open, I thought “ah, *name redacted* is up, I’ll ask if I can borrow his” and walked into his room, to the harrowing sight of he and his girlfriend mid-coitus. With the door WIDE OPEN.”
Itchy & Scratchy
“During a 6-month university exchange in the States I shared a tiny dorm room with a girl who didn’t wash her sheets in 6 months, had a chronic skin condition (we had bunk beds and I’d awaken early in the morning to hear her scratching in the bed above me, the flakes of her skin drifting down like snowflakes in the early morning light) and who woke me every few days at the crack of dawn blow drying her hair an inch away from my face. Our room was literally next door to the enormous women’s bathroom for our entire floor, but she didn’t want to use it because she was “scared of being electrocuted.” I’d come back to our room some nights to find her and her friends lying in my bed—literally under my doona—watching a movie on her laptop and eating takeaway from the Thai restaurant down the hill. Some mornings I’d wake and have to shake rice and bean sprouts out of my hair. The hilarious thing is that even though she was a bit of a nightmare to live with, on our last day I still gave her a little present and a ‘goodbye, good luck, all the best’ type card. She did not give me anything.”
Book Worm
“In a sharehouse in Harbord, I once borrowed a book that was placed on bookshelf in the living room area. It was a can’t-put-downer, and I finished it in one weekend. I RAVED about how good it was to my flatmates over dinner, because it was. Later that same evening I received a text message from one of the flatmates. Let’s call her Lisa, because that was her name. At the time of texting, Lisa was in the bedroom next to mine. Her message informed me that that book was a present to her and NOT mine to read until she had read it first. My taking it from the shelf was impertinent and selfish and I should have known better. Now I am scared to go near bookshelves.”
Only Girl (In The World)
“I lived with a girl called Marielle who played Rihanna’s ‘Only Girl (In The World)’ every single day for a year and whenever I hear it now my left eye twitches uncontrollably. In that same house was a Parisian called Charles who read Nietzsche obsessively, never shared any of the cheese his family sent him and didn’t speak to me for a month because he thought I broke his lamp. (I didn’t).”
Oh, Those Belgians
“My housemate put her room on AirBnb, and an eccentric Belgian took it. Early on, he looked at my phone lock screen, which was a cute, obviously romantic photo of me and my boyfriend, and asked optimistically ‘Eez zat your….brother?’ This remark was put into context when, two days later, I caught a glimpse of the contents of his washbag in the bathroom. It contained nothing but approximately 200 condoms.”
Not So Secret Diary
“My friend kept a secret Tumblr called ‘Confessions of a Terrible Housemate’ where he detailed, unknown to his housemates, all the things he had done in the house. Highlights included ‘I used your wooden spoons to tie-dye my underwear and now all the spoons are red’ and ‘I stole your wine and drank it sitting down in the shower.’ When he moved out he sent it to them.”
Sour Note
“I had a housemate who fell in love with me and then when I rejected him, he moved out in the middle of the night and we only found out by a tiny note he left us.”
