Don’t Let The Door Hit Ya…

**Alert** This post is nothing more than a frustrated rant.  I left out a lot, omitted much of the cursing I felt like doing, and didn’t mention the fact that I blame no one but ourselves for this situation.  Never EVER rely on friendship to keep housemate situations peaceful.  Always draw up a contract and get some sort of deposit when letting someone move in with you.  You will always end up regretting it if you don’t.

 

My Love and I have been together since October of 2011.  When we became a ‘couple’, his previous girlfriend still lived in his house, as she had nowhere else to go at the time.  There she remained until the 1st of October 2012.

We so enjoyed it when she moved out.  We finally had the place to ourselves.  No one to worry about coming in at ‘inconvenient’ times, or disturbing anyone else with our chaotic sleep schedule.  The place was finally OURS.

Except by Halloween 2012, it wasn’t.

Within weeks of ex-girlfriend moving out, old-high-school-buddy had contacted him and said he needed someplace to stay for a while.  He was having trouble in his marriage, and he needed to get out and get his head straight, try to fix the problems, etc. etc. I’ll call him ‘Andy’.  So, because Andy (technically his mother, since Andy was still just a kid) had let my Love live with him for about 6 months when they were in school together and my Love had left home, my Love felt that he owed it to him to help him out.

I met ‘Andy’ the day he began moving his stuff into our house.

He had nothing except the clothes on his back.  He made use of our guestroom (which I had only JUST gotten how I wanted it, in the wake of his ex’s departure).  I should note here that I went to great pains to clean/dust/vacuum/spruce up everything for his arrival.  It is important that you realize he arrived to a SPOTLESS bedroom and bathroom.  Spotless.

I’ll also mention here that it took a LOT of work to clean the shower, as his ex left it nastier than a truck stop porta-potty.  Apparently cleaning was against her religion, as evidenced by the MOLD growing in the toilet.  The toilet rings had toilet rings.  But that is a whole other story.

So, he moves in then INFORMS US… not asks, informs, that he’ll be getting a bunk bed to go in the other spare room downstairs for when his kids come visit.

I’m sorry, what?

A) My love doesn’t LIKE kids, had we realized he expected that they would be coming over here on a regular basis, we wouldn’t have said you could stay here at all.

B) Who said we were giving you the use of that room?  We certainly did NOT.

However, we didn’t object.  We’re reasonable people, so, if you would like to have your kids here sometimes, so be it.  But you could have at least ASKED us if we minded.

So began the theme for the entire rest of his stay here.  His VERY LONG STAY.

Things seemed to be going alright, once we adjusted to the fact that there were going to be kids in the house every other weeked.  Kids who apparently had no bedtime, and woke up at 5 a.m. while their father slept until 8 a.m.  Kids who come to ME telling me they’re hungry.  Or thirsty.  Really?  So now I’m your built-in babysitter so you can sleep in on the weekends?  Of course, there was always a ‘Oh, thanks, you didn’t have to do that.’  Yeah, because I’m the stone-cold bitch that’s going to look at a kid who’s hungry and say ‘Tell your dad’?  No.  I’m also not an ass-hole who’s going to come bang on your door and tell you that your kids are awake and hungry, either.

So you put me in the position to either be a jerk to kids, a jerk to you, or shut up and swallow it.  Thanks.

Six months into this adventure, ‘Andy’ meets someone.  Suddenly, he loses all interest in trying to fix his marriage.  He can no longer stand his wife, and has no desire to make the marriage work.  No kidding, it took him less than two weeks to decide this.  Could the fact that it took him two weeks to get into her pants have something to do with that? Coincidence?  You decided.

Now, almost literally overnight, this strange woman whom we have no clue anything about (except of course, that she’d gone to prison for stabbing someone, that tid-bit of information he did share with us) is now staying at our house SEVEN NIGHTS A WEEK.  The only nights she doesn’t stay are the weekends he has his children.

Mind you, I don’t work, and every two weeks, my Love works nights.  We keep the same sleeping schedule, so every two weeks, for two weeks at a time, I am up  and awake nights, instead of days.  Suddenly, I feel like my life has turned into a porno.  All night (and I am NOT exaggerating, unfortunately) I have to listen to this unknown person SCREAMING while they screw like rabbits.  All night.  Every night.  Now I was a prisoner in my own home, which had been turned into a porno set.  I was reduced to wearing headphones or turning the volume to max on the TV.

I swear I am a nice, considerate person.  I try to be as kind and generous as I can be.  After two months of them not taking the hint when I’ve got the volume turned all the way up on the television (which mysteriously only happened when they were having sex) and asking ‘Andy’ if he’d like to borrow a ball-gag, I was finally forced to straight up ask them to pipe it down.

His response?

“I didn’t know it bothered you.”

Are you kidding me?  Are you a freaking idiot?

During this little joyful era, I became the ‘bad guy’ in our house.  I was apparently out of line when I expressed my unhappiness with the fact that a stranger was coming into my house seven nights a week, and yet couldn’t be bothered to even speak when she walked RIGHT PAST US on her way to the ‘honeymoon suite’.  Nor could she be bothered to speak when she left the next morning.

In addition to staying here 7 nights a week (oh, and I’m not sure if I made this part clear or not, ‘Andy’ never even asked us if we minded!)  she started showering here, too.  I was again the bad guy when I made it clear that was unacceptable.  She doesn’t live here, and water is not free.  As things were, ‘Andy’ was paying $400/month to live here, using two bedrooms, almost exclusive access to a full bath, laundry facilities, included in his monthly ‘donation’ was electricity, water, garbage pick-up, cable (including the DVR for his room, which we paid the monthly fee for out of our own pockets), and access to Netflix.  And yet, somehow, alhtough he could manage to go out to eat almost daily, and go to concerts or bars, he could never manage to pay his rent on time.

Now we’re supposed to pay for your girlfriend to use these facilities, too?

Meanwhile, his wife discovers he’s seeing someone else, so she goes all ‘Sleeping With The Enemy’ and starts stalking him.  Which by proxy, means she’s stalking US and OUR HOUSE too.

I was also the bad guy because I complained that she was using dishes and just leaving them in the sink for me to clean up, and then after that, I’d find dirty spoons and knives in the silverware drawer, because she’d just wipe them off with a napkin and put them back in the drawer.  What?  Who does that?

There are many, many other things that happened, but I will just leave that to your own imaginations, because this has gotten way too long as it is.  The crowning jewel was when he got ANGRY WITH US for telling him that we thought it was time he moved along.  We told him in January that he had 90 days to find somewhere else to live.  My love had just asked me to marry him, and although we’d been together over two years, we’d actually had less than a month of time alone, living together, and we wanted our privacy and our house back so we could start our lives.  He actually got angry.  Like we owed him.

His final ‘Screw You’ came in the form of the state he left our home and belongings.

There was an inch of dust on every surface of the room.  He’d left the dirty sheets on the bed, partly to piss me off, and partly to hide the cigarette burn in the mattress.  The comforter he left ‘folded’ on the foot of the bed, although it was only folded to hide the myriad of cigarette burns in that, as well.  The floor of neither room was vacuumed (although he had a vacuum of his own he could have used… I would even have let him use mine.  He couldn’t be bothered.)  In addition to that, he couldn’t be bothered to clean the shower, either.  The shower he hadn’t cleaned once in the 1.5 years he lived here.

The cherry on top was the fact that it was raining the day he moved… so they tracked wet leaves and dirt all through my house, and didn’t bother to clean it up when they finished.  His final ‘screw-you’ to me.

Goodbye and good riddance.  Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

So, today, I am cleaning the disaster left behind Hurricane ‘Andy’ and his piece of fluff.

It will be a very, very long time before we open our home to anyone who isn’t an invited guest on a weekend visit.

So, in closing, dearest friends… if any of you are ever in need of a place to stay due to a personal emergency, please know that although we would LOVE to help you, we can and will not without extensive, exhaustive rules, deposits, and time limits.

You may thank ‘Andy’ for that.