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“To be fair, I needed a place and the sooner the better. And it was cheap — $300/month all included. BUT sight-unseen. I arrived at what appeared to be an abandoned hoarder’s trailer house. The door was open and I could smell the inside from the driveway. I balked — [my new roommate] looked a bit uncomfortable but offered to show me the room. Fortunately, it was the unused end of the house, but the bed had actual rat shit sprinkled across it.”
“There was a clear path through the multiple, used-only-by-his-two-dogs, appeared- to-be-found-on-a-curb couches stacked in the living room that went straight from the front door to his room — this left the carpeting in my end visually clean, aside from the rat shit, so there’s that. There was a massive, new, rat shit-covered water heater, boxes of junk (his word), random chairs and stools in various states of disrepair, coated in — no exaggeration — a quarter inch of grimy dust. The sink and it’s counter were stacked with dirty dishes (not plates, bowls etc. but colander, cake-saver, baking rack — odd things) caked with rotted, desiccated food….and rat shit. Massive, four to six foot cobwebs hung overhead like the best haunted house decor. Obviously this guy was in a deep depression for a long time, but I was stuck. Took him out to dinner for a chat where he did, to his credit, offer to pay for a hotel room while he cleaned up but I knew he didn’t have the money to spare or the motivation to clean. We wrote up an agreement that I would help get the place right and hygienic rent-free until one month after the house and yard were done with him working twice as hard as me. … This was in hopes of him powering through in a month or six weeks. Immediately cleared my room of everything, but I also immediately got a sinus infection after sleeping in the empty but not sanitized room for one night. He paid for the antibiotics. We cleared the garbage, couches, dishes and odd furniture, moved the massive water heater and he sold it, I used an exterminator-type pump sprayer to coat my bathroom with straight bleach three days straight (showering at the gym), we cleaned the carpets six times in two weeks, wiped all surfaces and cobwebs, replaced the defunct dishwasher and ran anything that would fit through with bleach. Scraped out the repulsive, reeking refrigerator and freezer. This all happened over two weeks during which he had weekends and a few random days taken off from his 8-4 plumbing job. Then he ‘needed a break.’ Two weeks of no movement until I pushed to get the patio unearthed — garbage, bagged and loose, tools, dog sh*t, random effluvia — he sat through most of this removal picking through each item, frequently asking if I wanted this or that. Then I unpacked what I was willing to put in cleaned areas. The snail-paced continuation dragged on for another month with the occasional successful completion of a task or area while I repeatedly got sick with sinus and lung issues which he dismissed as a weak immune system…It’s now six months deep and while my living quarters and the common areas are livable, normal maintenance has to be requested three times at minimum to occur. While I’m still not paying rent, I’m also scraping by because I keep getting sick, missing work, paying for medical stuff and buying air cleaners (two) so moving is not yet an option. All work has ceased. We had a I-cook-you-clean arrangement but he first started hoofing half a 4-5 person meal, then stopped wiping countertops, then started ‘wiping out’ my pots and pans, then deteriorated into leaving the dishes for 12 days before I started cooking only for myself. Outside of halfhearted gaslighting attempts and Olympic passive-aggressiveness, he’s mostly a decent person but refuses to get the fuck up and move forward. … I’ve been looking at military tents and long-term camping accoutrements because I’m almost convinced that living in a tent is healthier and I’m probably more likely to recover financially if I’m not here.”
—Anonymous
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