One of my ex-girlfriends was a real clean freak
I got home one night after work to see that I'd received a letter in the post - upon opening, I found it was my new car insurance documents, to be signed and returned.

Returning to the kitchen a moment later with a pen, I couldn't find the form. Maybe I'd left it where the pens were... nope. Scratching my head, I asked my girlfriend "Did you see what I did with that insurance form?"

"Oh" she replied "I put it away, it looked untidy"

And indeed she had. In the expanding file where all the documents and policies lived.

Length? About 30 seconds while I went to find a pen... O_o
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 13:55, 5 replies)

My house is filthy
I recently threw up half a chicken kebab over my bedroom floor. It left a orange stain in a circle about 50cm in diameter with a gap in the middle where my remote was.

My remote doesn't work any more and the stain won't disappear so I'm left with a constant reminder of my slothfulness.
(NuffMuff fucks shrubbery, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 12:17, Reply)

My sister and step-sister...
...surreptitiously write the date in the dust on top of cabinets, under tables, etc. when they visit each other's houses, and then check up on them at their next visit.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 12:17, 13 replies)

I had a job once
it was the summer before I went to university, and my parents told me to get a job doing something manual just to remind myself not to slack off. So I took a job cleaning holiday homes. It was before any illness so I was fit, the pay wasn't terrible and I thought it couldn't possibly be that bad.
To give the occupants of the holiday homes their due it wasn't terrible. Apart from the layer of grime, the discarded condoms and the hair clogging the shower. The only thing that made me retch really badly was the discovery of a dead rat in a fridge in one place and a collection of dead skin, toenail and finger clippings and scabs in another house. Luckily since I was in training the other woman dealt with those.

I'm ashamed to say I lasted two days
( Amberl was stripey and dominated Europe, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 12:11, Reply)

so there...
so there we all were, playing some wii,
reclining and relaxed, students all three.
"I'm parched, am I" said G to me,
as she reached for the mug that she could see.
The mug was on the 'sill right by the bed,
that place each night where G laid her head.

mug went to lips, but fell just as quick
as the jaw on the girl; "she's gonna be sick".
With hand over lips and eye's open wide,
we all crowded round to look inside.
I can never unsee that thing I did see,
a mouse doing breaststroke in a mug of cold tea.
(gr33npeace, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 11:43, 2 replies)

Hunt the Turd
My friend was in a fairly stable group house where they actually went through a number of houses of a period of years. Each time they moved into a house they had game, "Hunt the Turd". Each house mate hid a turd somewhere in the house and the owner of the last turd found was the winner.

Anyway they stopped after there was an all time winner. Weeks went by and they never found his turd. Eventually as they worked through the margarine, they realised the winner had melted the margarine in a saucepan and poured it back into the container, entombing the elusive turd.

I could never live in a house like that. Not without excessive retribution anyway.
(xixax, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 11:42, 16 replies)

Where's Johnny?
Back in the day when I needed such things, I disposed of used condoms by tying them up and flicking them under the bed. But there never seemed to be as many there as I remembered using. Odd. Years later I moved the bed and discovered the reason. The underside of the old bed had exposed springs, and dozens of condoms in various stages of crinkly decomposition were wrapped around them.
(Variable, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 11:33, 1 reply)

It looks clean to me.
Used to go on holiday to caravans and cottages with some friends of mine. Even thought the smell of various cleaning products hung heavy in the air when we arrived out would come the marigolds and the bleach and only after she had finished could we unload.

Couple of months after I bought my house they came to stay for a weekend. I made an effort with the cleaning but I knew I had failed when she came down to breakfast and said, "The good thing about those tiles in the shower is they don't show the dirt."
(jvz, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 11:29, Reply)

Moving out from Switzerland.
Eight months ago, we were in the process of moving out from our flat on the outskirts of Bern, ready for the move to Sydney via Blighty.
Moving out of a Swiss rented place is not easy. Inspections are routinely carried out using white gloves and I've known people lose their deposit through forgetting to clean the inside of the light compartment in their oven (whic is also wiped with white gloves).
We'd made a start in the week before the Mrs and kids went back to Blighty, with me staying for another week to finish up. However, Mrs Boris started feeling very peaky and rapidly came down with Swine 'flu.
So, we were not only one person down on the cleaning, but I also had to take time out to look after her (she's awful with even the mildest sniffle).
Anyhoo, time comes for them to go back to Blighty and I get to work on the flat. We're clean enough, but after two years with two small kids, mess can appear in the most unlikely places. I found almost a whole yoghurt adhered to the kitchen wall behind the table leg and a wealth of kids' toys in a ventilation duct.
I won't bore you with the details, but for eight days in the humid Bernese summer, I worked for fifteen, sometimes twenty hours a day to get the place clean. After a couple of days, I started to come down with the 'flu as well and I sweated like a pig in a microwave. I'd managed to get the inspection put off for two days on account of the 'flu, which the agency women were terrified of.
When the landlord came to inspect, I had a left-over bottle of posh Swiss wine (as I don't drink the stuff) and presented it to him for the extra two days stay of execution. He seemed to forget all about inspecting the place and signed it off pretty much there and then.
It was the result I had wanted - no close inspection of the things I had fixed or covered up - but now I was almost incandescent with rage. More than a week of hallucinating while scrubbing walls and floors, cleaning mould from the sealant outside the windows (not to mention all the pink Sarahan dust from a storm which hit just after I had cleaned all the windows and shutters), fishing through ventiliation ducts, scrubbing the inside of an oven till it was as clean as the day it had been installed (not to mention the trays and racks), dusting cobwebs from between the hundreds of spaces between the ceiling panels and all the hundred-and-one-thousand other will-sapping minutae that were required.
I felt like grabbing him by the throat and forcing him to check behind every cupboard door handle, inside every glass lampshade in the hall, wiping the top of every door.
As quickly as it arrived, it passed and I nearly keeled over, noticing I was dripping sweat all over the f***ing bastard of a ceramic kitchen hob - the devil's own bastard to clean without scratching.
He sheepishly shook my hand and left, telling me to leave the keys with the secretary at work.
It wasn't until later that day that I wondered why he was being so deferential and overly nice. I found the next day. The secretary had been supposed to tell me they were keeping half-a-month's rent from my deposit as the new tenants hadn't got round to signing the new contract yet.

Sorry for the lack of lulz. Just had to vent a bit...
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Tue 30 Mar 2010, 11:22, 2 replies)

If you want the undisputed king of filth..
Just look up GG Allin..

Without doubt the most filthy disgusting scumbag to ever walk the earth..
(CaptainSpaulding is the leader of the lost cause., Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:59, 5 replies)

a smell worse than death
I spent a few months working abroad for a family camping company in Europe. The day after I got there I was trained by my supervisor. This training consisted of him showing me how to ‘customer clean’ one of our caravans. I learnt from this that the blankets provided were (if the customers were lucky) cleaned one a year at the end of season.

Even more pleasant, after cleaning human fat from a a shower (and a lovely thing to see that was – who’d have thought fat goes orange and pink after it’s been sweated out?) and scrubbing the toilet and surrounding area with a sponge – supervisor announced to me that I was ‘now going to see (him) clean the cups with this very same sponge’ and preceded to do so.

Other pleasantries included my supervisor moving one of the fridges from the cooking tent into my house tent. The reasoning for this became clear a couple of days later when we had to clear up and pack down everything from our tents before moving from our site to the bigger second site. Fridge was suddenly my responsibility. Even just opening the fridge door a crack created a smell so putridly rancid and foul that it could be smelt from outside the tent for hours afterwards. Even when the area manager turned up to check on progress and agreed that as delagator my supervisor could make me do it I absolutely refused (it hadn’t been plugged in or touched in the 2 months I’d been there). In the end one of the other guys pulled it out into the middle of the communal area and blasted It with a hose for ten minutes. I felt a bit bad about this, but not too bad, because 1. he'd been there longer than me and actually had some kind of responsibility for that smell and 2. as sole girl I had a whole tent and now 2 fridges to deal with whilst the others had 1 tent and 1 fridge between two.
(babyaeroplanes, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:52, 3 replies)

B-B-B-B-B-B-Bonkers
My mum cleans the house before her cleaning lady arrives. Silly old moo.
(FUXTIX Not my words, Carol, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:22, Reply)

Watchdog student house
Having been a holiday rep and a student I have a lot of nasty stories. In my second year of uni I moved into a house with a few other people from halls. Those of us who had to work and had no where to go for the summer had the joy of trying to make the place into something more than a grotty cackhouse.

I decided to go for the kitchen, which was in the basement. Taking a pan out of one box I swear 300 flies jumped out at me, I immediately vacated said basement and refused to return. My housemate Rich was dubious and called exaggeration until the same thing happened to him and he had to apologise and take me to see a bush baby (I run a tight ship). We discovered that the previous tenants, incapable of lugging bin bags upstairs, had spent the year cramming full bags of kitchen waste into a spare room at the back of the kitchen. Now I don’t like living in grossiosity but I refuse to touch someone elses year old mouldy crap. Hence we spent our first four months as ‘adults’ learning the important lessons that 1. landlords are shite and 2. flea spray is shite.

Over the year the house gradually crumbled to pieces. In the final week of our year there the second bathroom of our 6 bed 2 bath house was finally installed, covering the place with soot and grubble. Just after we’d scrubbed the house to death in order to retain our deposits.

A few weeks later we all had calls from our parents (guarantors), all ready to give us a bollocking, and wanting to know why they’d just received letters from our landlords saying that they were liable for the £3500 we owed them.

So despite having spent the year making the house a lot better than it had been originally, they’d charged us not only to clear the mess they made whilst installing the bathroom, but for the actually installation of the bathroom its self. The bathroom which we’d already been covering in our rent for 12 months. On top of this we were subject to various ridiculous charges such as £7 per lightbulb (there'd been none when we'd moved in) and £50 to shift some videos that'd been left in one of the rooms.

Quelle surprise a year later when we see Leeds Student Homes on Watchdog charged with taking £250000 from students. They were in the paper again last week under their new name and 'new management' after getting charged £15000 for fucking about with fire alarms.
(babyaeroplanes, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:19, Reply)

All these stories have shamed me...
So, last night, after I finished work I blitzed the house from top to bottom - it's all sparkly clean now :)

Well, until the lodger gets back I suppose...
( snee held his breath since, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:09, Reply)

There's a rat in my bathroom (what am I gonna do)
OK, I'll be up front and admit that this isn't my story but is a re-telling of a story of one of my friends who we shall call V (for that is the initial of his name) from the halcyon days of my University in the mid-90's.

In our second year, we had all had to face the trauma and excitement of leaving halls of residence and moving into our very own student houses. V, along with a large group of lads had taken up residence in a house on Edgbaston road in Birmingham. Now this house, like many student places, was not the pinnacle of designer chic, but when they moved in had been big enough, and clean enough for their purposes. The only weird thing was that the kitchen had a fridge in it. And so did the downstairs loo. Anyway, over a period of 6 months of parties and returning from bars and clubs in variously mangled states the house began to take on that special student odour of putrifying kebab, which in itself is no big deal when you are 19 or 20, male and perpetually drunk.

Anyway, the days turned to weeks, the weeks turned to months, and terms and holidays slid past. Fast forward to the Easter holiday....

Easter had been a gloriously warm spring break. The various members of the house had all returned to bask in the warm embrace of their families for 4 weeks of home cooking and motherly love. I can only imagine that for V this made what was to come all the more traumatic. As the holidays came to an end and students began to return to university, V found himself standing outside his front door, key in hand and the first one to return to the house. He opened the door. V recounts that he noticed the smell the second he crossed the threshold; the high, sweet, sickly odour of death beneath the floor. Now V knew that they had had issues with mice and set about the unenviable task of trying to find the corpse, hoping that it would be under a kitchen cabinet or behind a sofa. Using his nose he began to sniff, terrier like, around the house to find the offending detritus. After a few minutes of work he found the smell was concentrated in the downstairs loo...this was odd. The pan, while filthy, was not a dead mouse. The strange toilet-fridge was closed, working and smelt as acceptable as student fridges can...but the odour was definitely emanating from the room. Thinking that perhaps the mouse was behind the fridge he decided to wheel the fridge out of the room to inspect underneath it.

It was at this point V puked for the first time. As the fridge was wheeled forward there was a sloshing noise of water spilling and a wave of putresence filled the house. Gagging, V looked around the back of the fridge. Now for those of you that clean behind your fridge you'll know that there is a bucket thing where all of the water that condenses in the fridge drains to. This bucket is normally sat near the pump and heat exchanger so that the warmth from these parts of the fridge help the drained water evaporate. This is a fine piece of design. Unless a rat has become stuck in that bucket and drowned. At this point the warmth and wetness becomes a machine for creating rotting rat soup. Despite the stench V knew he had to remove the contents of the bucket and thinking fast he armed himself with a stick and a bin liner. Using the stick he planned to fish the rat out, dump it in the binliner and run from the house to the bin. He had not, however, accounted for the reduced structural integrity of the rat. The stick went through the rate like a laser through butter. This in turn filled the water with an even headier combination of rat and maggots . Finally realising the power of cleaning products he decided the smart thing to do was to dump a bottle of bleach in the bucket and retire from the house for a therapeutic pint before having to scoop the flesh from the bowl with a (gloved) hand.

V still has a touch of thousand yard stare about his eyes 15 years later.

YAY! That was my first QOTW answer.
(Kitcar memeless in a meme filled world, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:09, 8 replies)

My dad...
My dad is somewhat of a neat freak. I think it's a combination of being the youngest child to a (somewhat scary) very houseproud Yorkshire woman, and time spent in the Army. He likes everything to be perfect, and will spend an hour ironing a shirt to make it 'right'.

I could give you many, many examples of me being screamed at as a kid for some minor crime (leaving some books out), but I think he made his position perfectly clear just a couple of weeks ago: I'd come to his house to book some tickets online, and had got a fried egg and hash brown sandwich from the caff next door (I had a hangover). I put it down on the table (in the wrapper and on a plate), and he turned to me and said "Don't you dare get any crumbs anywhere, I've just finished tidying. Sue will be here any minute!"

Sue is the cleaner...
(BelladonnaAnodyne Melissa's gonna wet herself, I swear..., Tue 30 Mar 2010, 10:00, 3 replies)

I bought this 3-bedroom condo...
and it is only 3 blocks from here to the Chicago home of Barack Obama. I am very bored and alone most of the time, and I figured that I should at least try, out of Merkin patriotic duty, to keep up with the housekeeping - after all, The Prez lives just down the street. He may pop over to borrow a cup of sugar, you never know.

I gave up.

I now have a Polish exchange student who's moved into one of my spare rooms. She does the cleaning/washing/cooking for me, I never see her, and she pays ME for the pleasure. The only drawback to this is that I'm afraid to walk out to the kitchen naked at 2am (like I used to) to make a pot of tea in case she is sitting on the couch watching telly.

I've had maids in the past - $80/month is REALLY not bad if you just need a little help. It's money well-spent.
(ohnonotagain It's worse than you thought. I'm Canadian., Tue 30 Mar 2010, 6:06, 5 replies)

I thought I had expunged these memories...
...and yet, they return to haunt me, thirty years, and three continents, later.

Cue wavy lines.

October 1980, and I presented myself, bright-eyed and bushy-bollocked, at Imperial College, to read engineering. Four of us white guys had struck up a friendship during our year out working, and so we ended up renting rooms above a travel agents on Wandsworth Bridge Road. Renting the two other rooms were two Hong Kong Chinese guys, studying at Chelsea College.

I liked them well enough, and we all seemed to get on ok. They'd often lapse into high-speed Cantonese, occasionally throwing out English words, like "tea towel" or "emitter follower." But holy mackerel, when they got going with the wok a fine mist of cooking oil vapour would cover every horizontal surface as well as the vertical surfaces adjacent to the stove. At the end of the year, they just buggered off, and we impoverished British guys (not having everything paid for by our government) had to strip to the waist and expend vast quantities of elbow grease and no little amount of noxious chemicals in order to get back our security deposit.

But the event I want to describe to you is the Pancake Party we held one Shrove Tuesday. Now we were (and remain) far from observant in any religion, but it seemed like a great excuse - as if we needed one - for a gathering at which we'd eat pancakes and quaff gallons of ale. Wags that we were, pancake batter was prepared, divided into different containers, and coloured with food dye. A roaring success, everyone ate and drank huge amounts, and we called time somewhere between 2 and 3, as 9:30 lectures were looming large.

At 5am the travel agent's alarm went off, dragging us back into consciousness. One of us saw the criminal leg it down Wandsworth Bridge Road, so we called the rozzers (none of us were in a particularly cogent frame of mind at the time), and two of London's finest dutifully turned up. We invited them into the kitchen, a scene of utter devastation; frying pans, half-emptied pancake batter containers, empty beer cans, scotch bottles, paper plates bearing bizarrely-coloured pancake remnants, and overflowing big black garbage bags. I'm reminded of the Spike Milligan line in one of his books about a place looking "like it had been bombed by unemptied Arab dustbins." And yes I've lived and traveled in the Middle East. It was Armageddon in that kitchen.

I still remember the senior of the two coppers looking around, licking the end of his pencil and saying in a very understated way, "so, students are we, lads?"

Thank heavens they never went beyond the kitchen. Passed out on the upstairs landing was a guest (hi Mike!) who had drunk of his fill, and passed out while urinating, falling backwards out of the tiny toilet, landing face-up and continuing to urinate, all over himself and the hall carpet. And sitting in the toilet bowl was something that I had been too proud to flush, fecal matter so brightly coloured (think neon green and bright yellow in equal measure) that I wanted to share it with all in the house.

And that place was nowhere near as bad as Philbeach Gardens, our home during our second year. A damp, rat-infested basement in Earls Court, land of murders (two in our year there), Australians, prostitutes and homosexuals. I'm still not sure which were the worst.


Long-time reader. First time contributor. Be gentle.
(IHaveComeAmongThee__Twice Tissues on the left. Self-esteem on the right., Tue 30 Mar 2010, 5:38, 1 reply)

A friend of mine
once replied to me saying "your dog is pissing on the carpet" with "The cleaner will get it on friday."

They didn't have a cleaner.

And it was tuesday.

:(
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 3:58, Reply)

HOT PISS

( mr horrible up yours, dickface, Tue 30 Mar 2010, 2:28, Reply)

When I was a student...
...I lived in the typical filthy shared house, much like many others being discussed here. Towards the end of term, the landlady told us she'd be coming to show some prospective tenants around, and could we make sure the place was looking decent. We took one look at the massive pile of dirty dishes, thought 'fuck that!' and hid them in the cupboard under the sink. Job done.

Landlady comes round. All goes well, until for some reason I've never understood, whilst showing them the kitchen, she goes "...and look, there's plenty of room under here for your cleaning things", and proudly throws open said cupboard to show them a term's worth of food/mould caked crap. Oh, the shame...
(Horns, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 22:22, Reply)

Dorms are Hell.
I thought I was pretty messy, but then I moved into a college dorm for the first time. The people next to me had the most disgusting room I have ever seen in my life. Not only could you not see the floor because of discarded food wrappers and trash, you couldn't see the walls either because one of them had decided to "decorate" by covering everything with duct tape.
They were also heavy, heavy drinkers and tended to hold parties that always involved lots of vomiting in corners. (and once right outside my door, so I had to jump over it every time I left the dorm, thank you so much, whoever you are)
Then one memorable day someone, using the convoluted and rare logic only those completely soused are capable of, decided the toilet was too far away and pissed on his laptop. And the bed it was lying on.
Needless to say, it never worked again.
(TheWonderfulWombat It came to me in a dream., Mon 29 Mar 2010, 22:15, 2 replies)

Not my house, a friends house.
I use the term friend loosely, because while we used to be 'best friends', these days she's a bit of a knob and only talks about Twilight, so I avoid her as much as humanly possibly to save my sanity. I used to go to her house at least once a week and I'm pretty sure that everytime I visited, the crap they have in every room had multiplied. I have never seen such a cluttered house.

She has a brother, he's about ten-ish now and he's the only boy and the youngest in the family, so he's basically a spoilt little shit and he obviously likes to make it known. Their living room is always covered in his DVDs and playstation games and he gets new ones at least once a week. It's at it's worst after Christmas, because he generally has all his presents that he can't be arsed to play with one at a time or take upstairs all lined up against one wall, which takes up about half of the room. They don't have the hugest house either, all of the rooms are kind of small and his shit everywhere just makes it even more cramped. You're permanantly stepping over piles of stuff.

When he gets in from school he just dumps his bags and books on the kitchen table and leaves it there until he decides to do homework (which I've never seen him do a lot of...) or when he needs it next for school. And God help you if you have to move it to sit down or use the table, because he will throw a tantrum if you touch his stuff, I've seen him batter his sister round the head with anything within reach on more than one occassion. It doesn't matter how much you have to step over or how cluttered and messy it makes the house, it is "my stuff and nobody is allowed to touch it, because it's FINE where it is!" I sort of want to smack him and shove everything in black bags.

I could tell you about the bedrooms, but I think you get the point.
(Melody was not PMSing on, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 22:09, 3 replies)

Most of the house is...
...relatively clean. My Mother is one of those women who HAS to clean everything everyday because she thinks the one day that she doesn't do it, she'll get some unexpected visitors who will then tell everyone she knows that she is a dirty pig and her house is disgusting. She isn't against walking into bedrooms without knocking to just randomly hoover or shout about how she is fed up of living in a tip. That led to some embarassing moments when my brothers still lived at home...

However, even she won't go into the room inhabited by my younger sister, because, to put it plainly, my sis is a dirty bitch. She hates cleaning up after herself, so she simply doesn't bother. If she eats in her bedroom the wrappers will go on the floor, you can only see patches of carpet under piles of clothes, crisps wrappers, empty coke bottles and plastic bags. She brings her cups, plates and bowls down about once a fortnight on threat of pain of death and they're usually in a pretty foul state. She doesn't put her clothes in a washing basket, those go on the floor as well and I'll come home to an average of about once a month and find my Mother sat surrounded by a pile of her clothes trying to figure out how many loads she's going to have to do to get through her washing. At least that's the state it was in last time I dared to step in there to find stuff she'd nicked from my bedroom. It could have changed since then, because I made the mistake of going in barefoot, only to tread on crusty knickers. Not nice.
(Melody was not PMSing on, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 21:47, Reply)

Boys are icky...
I’m going to be vague as I don’t want to ‘out’ my friend’s ex as the wrong kind of filthy bastard.
A friend of mine had the muckiest boyfriend in Christendom. He didn’t look or smell bad, but his house was like the junkyard in Labyrinth ("you like Charlie bear don’t you?") She went over to watch some films with him one evening and settled down on his bed to (cough, cough) watch. A while later, she’s waiting at the bus stop and people queuing behind her are whispering, on the bus – more whispers and the occasional funny look. Finally she’s arrives home and is stripping off to get in the shower, and there is it...a slightly greying fried egg stuck to the back of her skirt.
How long can you fail to notice that in your bed?
(leviathan in a snood Lurking aficionado, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 19:32, Reply)

I love you all, and your mighty tales of grot
God, you have no idea how happy reading all these horror stories make me. My house doesn't get hoovered very often, so I have a nice collection of dust and cat hair as well as piles of books, but nothing that rots or oozes or grows, and the bins are all emptied at least once a week.

I want to pin my sister's eyes open and make her read every single post on this thread so she never nags me about my housekeeping again.
(littlesunshine licked your blinky diodes on, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 19:30, 1 reply)

Off topic (but only just)
I once worked with a very pleasant fellow who usually provided sufficient witty banter to brighten even the most miserable of Trust and Company Administration courses (and believe me they pretty much all fell into the miserable category), and during breaks etc. we would often jump into his wagon and pootle off to the nearest food emporium for snacks. However, he didn't really believe in using dustbins...not when there was a perfectly good footwell in the car! All manner of detritus was to be found there: cans, bottles, wrappers, boxes, three month old copies of The Sun. Scabby just about described the situation, at least until that fateful day when I lifted my feet out of the mire only to find it ENCASED in....wait for it....a whole chicken carcass!

The nightmares continue to this day.
( number5 has been fighting tramps and losing., Mon 29 Mar 2010, 19:05, 2 replies)

Candles are the answer
Really! You only need one.

Just leave it, pop off to bed and wake with the smoke pouring under your door.

Call the boys in red.

Call the insurance company.

Equals

Proffesionally cleaned house, all clothes dry cleaned, new sofa, carpets and as a touch get the place decorated.

Cost: only £500 excess.

Popping home now to see if the builders have finished my kitchen and if the decorators have papered the hall / stairs / landing.

The above is true and there is a lot more but I can't be too specific as the claim adjuster may identify me.

But seriously - if you are cooking and your fire alarm goes off - put the fucking batteries back in asap. I was lucky, you may not be!

Going to invite the claims adjuster to my house warming so he can be proud of what his company splashed out on.
(Suck it and Sea, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 18:28, 15 replies)

I've only ever recieved one note off a housemate.
It was because I was running late for work, and the fact that I had about 8 pints and a curry up my council. I do the deed and leg it to work.

Upon my return that evening, I get to the bog, which looks like an oil slick had hit it, with a note with an arrow pointing to the shitpan.

Who ever the fuck did this fucking monstrosity, clean it the fuck up, ya fucking mink!

Length? from the rim to the water.
( Slippery Mick ‏, Mon 29 Mar 2010, 18:25, Reply)

on tour...
Back in the day when I toured in showbiz, I constantly looked for the cheapest digs to stay in so that my equity minimum would stretch to being able to eat and live like any other normal Joe.
Most places were spotless as it was generally older ladies with a love of theatre, renting out a spare room to a young, fit actor type very cheaply.
When you could you'd ask friends and ask if they knew anyone where you were going and if they had a bed to sleep on for a week.
One week I was in Newcastle and luckily my wife's best friend lived in Sunderland with her solicitor husband and they had a 7 bedroom place where there was plenty of room. I was expecting a luxurious country manor, all mod cons home cooked food etc etc.
I turned up to a sprawling house in one of the studenty areas on the city and I discovered when I arrived that most of the other rooms were let out to students and I was staying in one where the occupant was away.
You would think that they would have a had at least a quick tidy up and change the sheets, no not even that, it had the usual litany of mouldy cups and plates, filthy rug, fully grown dust bunnies under the bed, and it being very late at night I went to sleep in filthy unchanged sheets and was promptly bitten to fuck by the fleas infesting the bed.
Next morning I got up and when I was picking up the change that had fallen out of my jeans I discovered a used condom under the bed with some dirty knickers next to it. It may come as a surprise but I subsequently found out that the room’s occupant was female.
In great trepidation, I went to the (shared) bathroom which incidentally was huge and had a clam shaped pink bath for 2 in it. Now, I have been a student and have put up with a certain level of muck in my time, but I spent the next 2 1/2 hours scrubbing it from top to bottom, almost on the verge of vomiting, clearing way the detritus of months of neglect and bleaching the mould and stains before I dared wash myself in it. The rest of the house was just as dirty and the kitchen a shrine to botulism.
When I had a conversation with Wife’s BF about it she was uncomprehending that this could be an issue with anybody, but she did thank me for the cleaning as she had been meaning to do it since Christmas...and it was now Easter.
Years later she still asks whether I still have OCD, dirty bitch.
(nimrodihnio making gravy for one., Mon 29 Mar 2010, 18:25, Reply)