Too Dutty to be true!
On another occasion, I was sharing with an old college friend who turned out to be rather less hygeinic than I hoped for when we moved in together.

Now don't get me wrong, I am well capable of playing the waiting game to see if the clean fairy will come and pick it up before I get round to it, but when my flatmate was "busting for a dump" and my other half was round and in the bath (only loo in bathroom) there was a bit of a predicament.

I heard nothing about it until later, and assumed he had hopped down to the pub, until he cruelly disillusioned me, by proudly announcing that he had just pulled down his kegs, shat in a sainsbury bag (in his bedroom) and then thrown it out the window onto the roof of the flats opposite.

I cringed every time I saw that sainsburys bag for the next 6 months until I fucked off out of there.

No, we don't talk anymore.
(justin7926, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 20:10, 1 reply)

Ooh! Ooh! My husband grew up in squalor...
One day, when he was a kid, he found what he thought was a forgotten chocolate cookie behind the couch. Only after eating it did he realise it was an undiscovered kitten turd.

I admire his honesty, but even though it's twenty years later, I am constantly asking him to brush his teeth.

(For those interested: it wasn't that bad, apparently, but not something you'd want a second helping of, either).

In a slightly similar vein, I once lived next to some poor buggers who had a twenty-year-old son with cerebral palsy. He wore adult nappies.
The neighbour's fence, like their house, (and like our house), was in a state of major disrepair and one day the fence between our houses collapsed.

After being enthusiastically greeted (leaping, face-licking, etc) by our exceedingly dim dog one day, I saw that he had just finished snacking on an entire, poo-filled, adult nappy from next door, which he'd found lying in the new wilderness.

The dog was unable to understand why I didn't seem to love him as much after that.
(lonelybadger, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 20:06, Reply)

Cleaning nightmares.
I was threatened at knife point with a 12" razor sharp chef's knife at 3am by my beloved because my stuff was encraoching her personal space.
Things that scared me:

1) She was actually foaming at the mouth, her eyes were a scary red, and she was laughing in a very disturbed fashion, but she NEVER takes drugs.

2) We were jointly renting the flat together, having moved in as a couple, and my space was a small computer desk approximately 3' x 18" plus room for a chair in front. The rest of the flat (presumably HER space) was about 100 square meters.

3) I bought her the frigging knife as a birthday present!

Number 3 pissed me off most of all.

Anyway, we are still together now, but have separate houses. This seemed preferable to being gutted with my own present.
(justin7926, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 20:02, 1 reply)

My mrs is a filthy cow.
I went for a piss in the sink the other day and it was full of tea leaves. Women! Pah! They haven't got a fucking clue.
( Captn Hood-Butter is not dead yet., Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:50, Reply)

I see several 'bare-minimum' types on here.
Types like me, in fact.

I'm not talking about people who do the absolute bare minimum to stop their house drowning in accumulated life-shite (the trendy term for rubbish). Like the kind of person who will, grudgingly, consider taking out the piles of rubbish before they walk to the bins of their own accord, in order to end the suffering of having attained sentience in such a filth pit.

That's not the bare minimum. If there's mould, you're doing it wrong. I'm talking about this 'clean but not tidy' mindset that it's so easy to fall prey to, and which people seem to regard as an adequate state of maintenance.

What it basically pans out as is, you can get it together to dispose of anything that's actually liable to become a health hazard, but don't see the need to bother with anything that isn't going to go poisonous and kill you.
I suspect this is the attitude of those who, like me, were appalled to discover upon moving away from the parental bosom, discovered that housework genuinely doesn't do itself, and while they have grudgingly come to terms with the idea, are still subconsciously waiting for the Chore Fairies to turn up again.

Fat chance if you live with people like my flatmate, who apparently doesn't notice either mess or filth (the distinction; mess is relatively sterile; filth is defined as 'anything sticky or slimy').
Anyway, lazy bastards the lot of you. Keeping things tidy is easy.

On the other hand, the half arsed attitude, or even the don't-give-a-shit attitude, are both infinitely preferable to living with the truly anal. You know the type. Nothing is out of place. EVER. They leave notes. They get pissy about cups still being there the evening of the day they were used. In the case of my last flatmate, they have the house the way they want it (empty and boring), and any attempts to imprint some form of personality on it - having DVDs or your console in the living room, for an e.g, are met with gentle but pathetically insistent polite requests that everything reside in your room, lest the flat look like people actually live there.
This guy, John, was in a class of his own. Weekends were not for socialising, or even studying, and certainly not for sitting around enjoying yourself. Weekends were for hoovering and dusting. Despite the fact nothing ever happened in the flat. And obviously I was expected to assist - or so I assume, because he never actually asked for help, but he did get noticeably more aggressive (in an endearingly passive sort of way) on Sundays and Mondays, especially if I'd left the building during that time.

And he always, always redid my washing up. And then he got annoyed because I stopped washing up. In comparison, living with a slob is a breath of fresh air. Even if I am currently surrounded by chipshop containers and sweet wrappers as I type this, I breathe free in the knowledge that nobody is going to walk in, look at me for seven straight minutes without blinking and then say "Thanks for your help, by the way.", before storming off to hoover his bedroom for the fourth time that week. Messy but clean; it's the way to go, folks!
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:50, 7 replies)

The "fifteen-second rule" concerning dropped food...
...in my house can be stretched out to hours, sometimes, if nobody's watching. My place is not clean, but visible cat hair, lint and grit can be removed. The invisible stuff doesn't worry me.

I tell myself that I am building up my immune system, and then munch away happily on these serendipitous finds.

C'mon. You know you do it, too. Don't you...?
(lonelybadger, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:49, 3 replies)

Well, I'm a bit of a freak.
I'm utterly obsessed with cleaning and tidying, terrified of germs and have the saying "if it smells of bleach, you know it's clean." I just enjoy having an immaculate house, somewhere I can invite people back to without fear of it being a tip. I'm currently training the other half in my way of living - we've been living together for just over a year and he's learning.

Apparently dull women have immaculate homes, well call me dull as dishwater then.
(Lucoire tutted and shook her head in disbelief on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:45, 3 replies)

I've just bought a house
According to the neighbours, the previous owners were evicted from their rented house due to the vermin caused by them not cleaning. They owned my house for some reason and kicked out the lovely old lady who was renting it so they can move in. It's a small 2 up 2 down with one bedroom halved to fit in a bathroom. There is 1 of me and it's ideal. There were 4 of them, 2 big dogs and several cats. The parents were both alcoholics.

They never cleaned the place while they lived here.

The gaps between the floorboards were full of dirt, 50p jewellery, cotton buds, hair pins, hair and false nails.
There was food splattered on the kitchen walls.
There are drink stains on the bedroom and living room walls.
Rubbish was dumped outside in the garden rather than put in the bin, as was all the dog shit.
Every crack or joint is full of black sticky shit - years worth of dirt, including the frames of the uPVC doors.

The toilet in the bathroom broke about 6 months before they were evicted for not paying the mortgage. It was still broken when I moved in (pump was trashed somehow - 30 minute job for an ametuer like me to fix). The toilet bowl was also covered in shit. The shower curtain used to be blue however it was mostly brown when I arrived.

And I can't get over how many fucking flies there are in this place. Winter has only just finished!
( thistle, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:44, 2 replies)

After going batshit mental
towards the end of last year, I didn't clean for about 3 months. My apartment was fucking filthy, the only thing I did was replace the cat litter every couple of days and wash out their food bowls.

It came to a head late December when I was in the hospital under a 5150 (mental health hold) and my boyfriend was appalled at the state of the place (he fed the cats - I never ever had people over, not even him).

I spent 3 days over new year scrubbing and cleaning every corner, and once it was done.....WOW!
I had a small dinner party, and it really helped my mental health - just having a clean apartment.
Now? Mentally I'm on the road to recovery, I have a list of daily/weekly/monthly chores on my fridge, and I stick to it. It's awesome waking up every day in a clean apartment. I also have my friends over at least twice a week.

Last weekend, I drove to Arizona and spent 2 days cleaning my boyfriends sons place. Put the same list of chores on his fridge. He is loving having a clean apartment, too.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:43, 1 reply)

My house is lovely, thanks for asking.
However, I did once have the pleasure of cleaning my family's rental unit after the alcoholic shut-in moved out. Highlights:

1. Mold. Did you know that mold can grow on window panes? There was a cup of coffee that had been sitting on a shelf for so long that it had an inch of mold crust. Every surface in the house had to be wiped down so we could repaint it.

2. The dog. The woman had an old golden retriever that I used to take care of when she left town. This generally involved me spending half an hour removing the dog's ticks, some of which were the damn fattest ticks I'd ever seen. During house cleaning I swept up bags full of dog hair, some containing ticks. The whole time I felt like I had hairs on my tongue and in my lungs.

3. The odor. The whole place smelled like some oppressively hot tropical marsh because of the dog, it had a sort of sickly sweet rotting meat smell. This smell refused to go away after days of airing out the house, so while cleaning for four days straight I had to just suck it up and try not to hurl. Even after we repainted, the chemical smells didn't completely cover the dog smell.

4. The kitchen. She had left a lot of her stuff at the house, including dirty dishes stacked in the sink and a messy fridge full of beer and uncovered foods. Now, this is in Hawaii, land of the cockroach. I patiently went dish-by-dish through the sink killing little baby roaches, and then did the same for the cupboards full of somewhat clean dishes.

5. The dirt. The floor was (cheap) wood that had been painted by a genius former tenant. I thought the brown streaks on the floor were places where the dog had scratched away the paint. Once I started mopping, it became clear that she hadn't cleaned the floor since she moved in. The brown streaks all scrubbed off in a muddy mess.


What's that, you say? We just had to clean, we didn't actually have permanent damage to the house? Fuck you. We had to repaint (several coats and spackling to cover stains and damages), tile the floors and retile the kitchen, replace appliances, and do something about the nest of bees living in the wall that the tenant had failed to mention. On the behalf of landlords everywhere, THIS IS WHY WE ASK FOR A FUCKING DEPOSIT, YOU BLOODY INGRATES. It's because it appears that most people choose to just move out when they don't feel like cleaning the epic messes they've created.

And my mother called a few weeks ago to tell me about how she was exhausted from spending all week cleaning up after yet another messy tenant. It's disgusting that people even live like that. You people should be ashamed of yourselves.

That is all. Have a lovely day.
(Exempt OH WOW, VICODIN, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 19:07, 10 replies)

Am I allowed to post something reasonably serious?
As someone who is actually allergic to washing up liquid in all its many forms AND latex gloves, I tend to wash up once a week and be as economical as possible with cups etc because I fear food poisoning and bees/ants/Mickey Mouse.

My brother (as an example) has to be nagged to wash up anything, will use five mugs in one day, and does not have to look like a melting candle every time he actually does it.

For the record: Complain all you like about the washing up, but it's probably not as bad as you think.

I'm aware that my past few QOTW answers have been whining crap, so sorry.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 18:38, 9 replies)

A few tales
I once lived in a shared house where one of the occupants lifted up and wiped underneath a piece of toast that was in the process of being buttered by one of his housemates.

Another friend bundled all his dirty dishes and god-knows-what into a duvet cover and hid them in the attic of the bedsit he was vacating as he couldn't be bothered to clean them.

I also had a school friend whose mother was known to hoover their driveway, often in the early hours of the morning.
(Haywood Manley, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 18:28, Reply)

paper plates
and plastic cutlery. an absolute godsend for anyone who hates washing up. just use them and bin them, job done!
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 18:21, 11 replies)

Can't wait to get married
My brother and I shared an apartment with a guy I'll call Dave. Dave was affectionately labeled "Brain Dead Before Shower". He also had the bad habit of leaving his soiled plates wherever he finished his chili or lasagna, leaving everyone else to pick up after him.

After repeatedly reminding him that we weren't his dish cleaners, my brother had enough and started throwing dirty plates, silverware and all into his bed, under his sheets. Many nights I awoke to Dave's screaming after he got home late and was looking to a nice nap but had to deal with dirty plates and dirty sheets.

After one such episode he was heard to exclaim "a haute voix" "I can't wait 'till I get married and I'll never have to wash another dish!"

What a dork!
( BrokenCoccyx doesn't mind if you grope on, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 18:09, Reply)

most of my family suffer from OCD
so i grew up in an insanely clean house. as a result, i take cleaning a bit(lot) less seriously than my mother does. i'm much cleaner nowadays than i was as a teenager, though. my first place was an absolute shit-heap. seriously, i don't think i cleaned once for the last 3 months i was there. apathy and depression meant that i just couldn't be arsed. i spilled a tub of ice cream once, i put an envelope over it to "soak it up".
that was nothing compared to my "let's get evicted" party. instead of washing the dishes, i hid them in a cupboard. clothes, both dirty and clean, were shoved under the bed. things got worse after my guests arrived. my mate's boyfriend, who i hated, smashed a bottle over another lad's head, before dragging his girlfriend into my bathroom for sex. they managed to knock over a large tin of white emulsion, which covered both them and my bathroom carpet. another friend discovered the catering-sized jar of cocktail gherkins i'd bought(i really like gherkins) and had instigated a full-scale gherkin war. people were hiding behind the furniture, throwing smelly green missiles at each other. you could hardly take a step without hearing either the crunch of broken glass or the squelch of a gherkin. the place was utterly trashed, but fuck, it was a great party!
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 17:59, 2 replies)

Earthquake Rubble
I'm in my final year at uni, and am living with 4 guys. Apparently, I, the only female, am by far the messiest. I disagree because at least my mess is only knee high paper, books and clothes - leaving out piles of dirty plates is disgusting!

Anyway, last week I spent 6 hours tidying my room, then asked one of my housemates for his opinion - it apparently looked like "an earthquake had hit the house and all the rubble has been dumped in [my] room!"

I refuse to tidy ever again!
(deadly_sinners, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 17:58, 2 replies)

First year at university...
... but of course it was bound to start that way.

Shared a flat with six other guys. They were supposed to be like-minded, tidy souls, or so the prospectus promised. They were all untidy, Northern beer-drinking, non-smoking science students. I was not. (They also occasionally got laid. Damn, another difference there...)

The flat was at the top of the Toblerones (those who have seen them will know). The kitchen was on the top floor, and always had the windows open as the heating was invariably on full. Black rubbish bags festooned the floor, occasionally spilling their fragrant contents onto the permanently sticky floor. The mice had a field day.

I was persuaded, being the only one who could cook, to roast a turkey just before the break for a flat Christmas dinner. I agreed, on condition that others shared the work, doing the shopping and the washing up. The others brewed some suspicious white filth called wine, some of which was cracked open for the dinner, amongst a large number of other bottles. Things took a turn for the lary, and I retreated to the girls' flat opposite, reminding that the washing up should be done at some point. The next day, I disappeared, with hangover, for five weeks' barely-earned holiday.

January comes, and my parents give me a lift to my lovely residence. My mother takes a box of food up to the kitchen, and comes down looking ashen, saying that it's best not to go up there. They depart, quickly, leaving me to the depravity.

Eventually I venture upstairs. The windows are closed, and an unholy aroma fills the kitchen. The floor growls a little and undulates, where three of the bottles of home-brew have popped their corks to ferment their contents in the warm air, mixed with something that may once have been either roast potatoes or sprouts. The bin bags are still in attendance, some straining at the seams, others possibly just about ready to take a degree in social sciences. On the fridge, which is ajar (the milk has yet to make its escape, but is obviously thinking of it) is my roasting pan, with the partially consumed turkey carcass welded to the bottom. Some of the meat on the bones seems to be having a party- the rest is possibly trying to reattach itself to the bones in an attempt to get the bird to fly again. All of the plates are still on the table, leaving the appearance of a five week old Manchester Marie Celeste. WIth stuffing.

Home, sweet home.

I went off to a friend's flat to smoke something to take the smell out of my nose. The washing up was eventually finished a couple of weeks later...

In my second year, the two bedrooms on the ground floor of the house I lived in were occupied by a couple... Well, they had one room, the other was used by their two kittens as a carpeted latrine. By that time, it seemed completely normal to let the little ones shit and piss on the yellow and brown swirls of Axminster.
(groover j lazerus, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 17:55, 1 reply)

Mouldy mountaineer.
In about 1995 my brother and I climbed Ben Nevis. When we returned home I emptied out the main part of my rucksack (the only part of the rucksack I'd put anything in) and chucked it into a cupboard in my bedroom.

My room took on a strange musty smell not long after this which eventually either dissipated, or I got used to (and visitors were to polite to mention).

In about 1998 I emptied the cupboard in my room, and out of a vague curriosity (or a sudden moment of treasure hunting greed) I decided to go through all of the external pockets of my rucksack, which had been left in the cupboard and forgotten about 3 years previously.

It was here that I discovered a plastic sandwich bag filled with a runny brown mixture of filth that made me retch. Turns out it was the vile remains of four sandwiches that my sister in law had made for me and put in my rucksack the night before my brother and I left for Ben Nevis. She'd done the same for him but he'd forgotten to tell me. Nice.
( Evil Bastardo, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 17:49, Reply)

Courtesy of my cat...
when moving out of my old gaff I found a dessicated frog behind the washing machine.

And when I pulled the fridge out there was a spider so big it nearly needed its own postcode. It must have liked the warmth from the fridge workings. Seriously it was as big as my hand.

which is why I no longer pull stuff out to clean behind.
( Sallyrsm, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 17:24, Reply)

My young lady
decided to redecorate our front room (obviously I wasn't asked if it wa something I'd agree to, that would be silly but this is a rant for another time I feel) yesterday and, after moving everything out, I'm damned if I can get it all back in again. I've also managed to lose the curtain pole, nets and curtains themselves.

Anyway, amongst the stuff shifted from one room to another, or in this case the bin, include: A mummified apple from a laptop case (not opened in over two years); Several pictures that the puppies we had had nibbled/pooped on (18 months ago).

Lastly, or firstly, depending on your point of view, when we moved into our current abode the previous tenant had left, in the loft, a four foot by four foot reinforced cardboard box FULL of porn. I didn't check if it was stuck together but it smelled disgusting.
( Funkenschlag still likes dogs more than cats, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 17:09, Reply)

We got rudely awoken one night to the sound of scurrying
It was quite unnerving because we were sleeping on an airbed, and the noise seemed worryingly close to our ears. My rented bedroom was so messy we had to have a few tries to find the source. Turned out we had a mouse nest in the wardrobe and they were doing the rounds after lights out.

It was completely impossible to catch them. We were up half the night. Fortunately I had a Boa (not the feathery type, the snakey type) and so left that out and turned the lights off. The demise of one mouse was punctuated with a sudden squeak, and the second a short while afterwards.

I now run my own pest control business. True story.
(Mortal Wombat - he's just an excitable boy, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 16:17, Reply)

If you clean my house.
I'll show you my tits.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 16:17, 16 replies)

We lived in a house
were nobody cleaned. We'd wash up only when there was nothing left to cook in, and the paper plates and food trays had all gone.

Every inch of the radiators were draped in clothes... stiff from not having the laundry skills of a woman about the house. The tumble drier blew lint everywhere in the house.... even in the parts that we thought only the white powdery residue from the Great Fire Extuingisher Fight of 1992 could get. We didn't know that the drier had a filter. Likewise, we didn't know that vacuum cleaners stopped picking up when full.. we just thought we were shit at housework.

We had some mr sheen for cleaning the top of the Table Top Space Invader that was in the kitchen and doubled up, neigh trebled up, as an ironing board and dining table for 6.

My brother had a large deep fat frier, and I wanted to chnage my sump oil on the car. Now he'd had this device for 2 years, and never changed the fat, just topped it up. I took his frier, and emptied the oild down the grid, then used it to collect my sump oil, and then poured that down the grid too... (at this point you might say "why not just position your car over the grid?"... well, I didn't want to drop my sump bolt as happened last time.)

So when done... I give the Deep Fat Frier a rinse, fills it up with a bottle of Spry I got for it, and job done.

The ungratefull fecker complained that the new oil stopped his nuggets going how he liked them - rancid!
( Piper Alpha is being a grumpy northerm bastard on:, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 16:15, Reply)

well....
i read on the bbc website the other day about how often you should change your bed sheets.... or was it on here??

anyway

I have been in my flat for 18 months now and that article prompted me to go and buy a second pair so i could wash the ones i had been sleeping in all that time. fresh sheets are nice eh?

once a week?

fuck off
(g-rex, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 16:10, 14 replies)

Silverfish
My first flat was very clean and tidy, but at night, hundreds of silverfish would dart across the bathroom floor. I tried to kill them but they're nippy little fuckers, and I only managed to assassinate a couple. I hate silverfish. Why did they want to live in my bathroom? What is the point in silverfish? Does the presence of silverfish mean my bathroom was dirty?

Silverfish scare me. Wikipedia refers to them as fishmoths and carpet sharks. Horrible little things are Silverfish.
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:54, 11 replies)

I just cannot bring myself to clean
I work in the day, I'm in 4 gigging bands, two of which are money-earners. Add to this rehearsals and the odd bit of flyer/web design, doesn't leave much free time. On the odd occasion I do have a couple of hours free, and my choice lies between Relaxing or Hoovering, it's very likely I will choose the former.

Saying that, the flat isn't too bad, if you don't mind a bit of dust or the odd pile of clothes, and we normally manage to get the rubbish out before we reach Edmund Trebus levels. There has however been a recent increase in the presence of small creatures - something like a cross between a beetle and a woodlouse - walking around the flat. They seem harmless and disappear if you leave them alone. Maybe they're crawling into my mouth at night.
( valoukh newsgash.wordpress.com, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:39, 5 replies)

I thought I knew how to keep a clean house
Apparently not.
Shortly after moving in to a new flat with my ex, she chided me for not cleaning the bathroom 'properly'. I looked at it again and said 'Well, it looks clean to me.' She shook her head and went off in a huff. I found out what I had done wrong when it was her turn to do the cleaning the following week. She had run a bath and put all the bottles of shampoo, conditioner and shower gel in 'to give them a wash, because they get dirty too.'
Silly me, I never knew. And I nearly induced apoplexy when I mistakenly put a spoon in the fork section of the cutlery drawer.
( ThisCaledonianClown has left it far too late, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:39, 4 replies)

My Mum is a nutter
I think this aversion to cleaning is because my Mum is the sort of nutter who has to have an extra-super smart and clean room in case anyone visits. Don't touch. Don't leave any crumbs. Don't drip. On pain of death by screaming ab-dabs. I love my Mum but she drives me mental. She thinks she's being rebellious if she leaves the hoover in the hoover cupboard for just a day. She actually doesn't go out much because she'd rather be at home making sure home is clean and looking fantastic. When I met my mother in law, the difference could not have been more drastic. Dog hair, circles on coffee tables, and a general feeling that if it doesn't kill you, it's clean enough. This trait has been passed on to my wife. Having spent my formative years under the yoke of a cleanliness despot with the ability to throw slippers around corners, this was a breath of only slightly less than fresh air.
(Rickormortis My wife does my stunts for me, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:18, 1 reply)

Pearoast
I lived here for about eight months.


( MatJ LOOK, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 15:13, 10 replies)