Housemate from Hell: Six Telltale Signs

Admit it, somewhere along the way you’ve ended up living with a less than perfect housemate.

If so, you may remember having to endure some of these less than pleasant habits.

1. Dishes, dishes everywhere

Whether you share a flat or a house, the kitchen is a hub of activity. People need to eat, that’s just science. What they don’t need to do, however, is create an incredible amount of washing up, which they then leave in every place imaginable.

Sometimes you might be in a hurry, and that’s fine. But come on, at least rinse whatever concrete-like substance you’ve been eating off the plate before you slide it under the sofa, to be discovered four months later coated in mould.

2. The note-leaver

There are too many people out there who think the best way to solve a problem is to leave a passive-aggressive notes around the house. There’s a reason hostage negotiators don’t use smiley-infested notes to solve crises; they don’t work.

Stop it, and just tell someone if they’re annoying you.

3. The wannabe Hendrix 

With a 4pm E-Submission deadline looming, you’re at your desk at the end of your wits. You sweep the crushed Red Bull cans off your dusty textbook and read the problem question one last time.

The fog starts to fade. Surely it wasn’t that easy all along? You scramble for a pen when BAM – a juddery ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ riff bursts through your wall like an out of tune bull in a musical china shop.

Your concentration is shattered, the epiphany gone. There’s a time and a place to imitate Slash, and that place is in a soundproofed music room, not in a student house.

4. The food fascist

For centuries, humans have shared food in order to survive. Somewhere along the line, we seem to have forgotten how this works.

I’m not saying you should let a housemate plough through your weekly shop like a one-person plague of locusts, but letting someone have an occasional splash of milk or handful of pasta probably won’t kill you.

Besides anything else, you expend time and effort locking up your personal loaf of bread in a cupboard as well defended as Fort Knox. Sharing is caring, so chill out.

5. What personal hygiene?

You’re in the living room enjoying a meal you managed to scrape together using the remnants of a weekly shop that’s lasted you two months.

Your housemate shuffles into the room, wearing a t-shirt soaked in Sobar quads and Chickoland ketchup. It turns our their bed has been replaced by a mound of dirty clothes and a mushroom farm is blossoming in a particularly murky corner.

Don’t let your disregard for hygiene be a threat to the health of your housemates. Running a hoover around your room once in a while won’t kill you, but black mould might.

6. The BNOC (or at least that’s what they like to think)

You’ve had a long day. Exhausted by 9-5 lectures, you want nothing more than to be cocooned in blankets on the sofa, cup of tea in hand, with an Eastenders omnibus on the TV.

Then you find out that your housemate is hosting pre-drinks for the fourth night in a row. You’re forced to retreat to your ice-cold room, struggling to watch BBC iPlayer while the party rages on downstairs.

We all love a night out, and some people have a more active social life than others. Just show a bit of consideration when planning Project X every other night.

There is no such thing as a perfect housemate. We’re only human, and all have habits that some might consider annoying, even if they seem perfectly normal to us.

If you are a perpetrator of one of the things on this list, you’re probably fine. If you’ve ticked all of them, you might want to change your ways, or you’re at serious risk of having a few Tell Him/Tell Her posts submitted in your honour.

Did we miss anything that housemates do that can really grind your gears? Any of your housemates ticking one too many off the list? Let us know in the comments.