The first thing you should do when you move in with new people is make a cleaning rota
Otherwise the person with the lowest filth threshold always ends up doing all of the cleaning. Other than the time I lived with someone who thought that everything should be cleaned at least every other day, that person always ends up being me. My filth threshold is pretty high but I somehow always end up living with people with even higher filth thresholds than myself. Highlights include the time I lived with two other girls and a guy and after a few months realising that I was the only person who ever cleaned the kitchen or the bathroom. I decided to stop doing it to see how long it would take before somebody else did it. After about a month I really wanted to clean the bathroom but managed to restrain myself, two months passed and still nobody had cleaned it. By about the three month stage the toilet bowl started turning orange(?!?) and still nobody cleaned it. I was reaching the point where I couldn't restrain myself anymore when one of my housemates mentioned that a friend of hers was coming at the weekend, "surely she'll have to clean the bathroom before her friend gets here - there's no way anyone could have visitors over with the loo in that state" I thought, so left it as it was. After her friend had been I gave up and cleaned the bathroom - anyone who could have a friend to stay and leave the toilet bowl orange was obviously never going to do any cleaning. Bizarrely these people who would think nothing of an orange toilet bowl always kept their rooms and the living room meticulously tidy (the kitchen was another story altogether).

The guys I live with at the moment seem to be impervious to mess and dirt though. If I stop constantly tidying up after them it takes about two days for the dining and coffee tables to be piled so high with crap that you get mini avalanches and about three days for the kitchen counters to get to a similar state (this takes slightly longer due to the fact that they will use the bin most of the time until it gets full - it never occurs to them to empty it). They will occasionally do dishes but will never wash all of them and I'm pretty sure neither of them have ever wiped the counter tops. I'm the only one who has ever cleaned the bathroom or kitchen. I figured out early on that neither one of them would end up doing it so I made a deal with them that I'd do most of the cleaning as long as they did the hoovering (I have a serious dust allergy so hoovering has me reaching for my inhaler every time). Despite this deal I've done the hoovering more times than the two of them combined. Basically every time I spend a whole evening (sometimes the whole day) cleaning the house (maybe once every three weeks or so - I told you I had a high filth threshold) I'll ask them each individually if they can do the hoovering (they both always say they'll do it). When it got to the point where downstairs had a whole medium sized tree's worth of leaves on the floor after not being hoovered for three months, I gave in and did it myself. I did, however, make one of them empty the hoover bag for me because the last time I did that I ended up in A&E.

I still prefer my current housemates to the old ones though. One time I was seriously ill with the flu (actual flu - not just a cold) and they had a house party where all of their mates were so pissed that they were falling all over the place, puking in the bath, and pissing on the toilet floor. I got kept awake til 5AM by this party and actually got shouted at by my housemate when I asked if it would be possible to wind the party up since I had a splitting headache. By the next evening they'd tidied but not cleaned the piss off the toilet floor, the puke out of the bath, or the red wine off the walls. So since I was fed up of putting my shoes on to go to the loo, didn't want to have to scrape encrusted vomit off the bath when I was eventually able to stand for long enough to shower, and didn't want to lose money out of my deposit due to red wine stains on the walls, I ended up sobbing on my hands and knees scrubbing away the filth from their party. They watched me do this and didn't even offer to help let alone do it instead.
(mmm....beer, Thu 25 Mar 2010, 20:50, Reply)