AITA for throwing my cousin out of my house after she tried to bill me for things I never asked her to do
My cousin and I are both in our late twenties and shes been a trainwreck the last few years, a couple of bad relationships, a couple of fired-from situations, and she lost her share of a rental about two months ago. Family is small, so when she had nowhere else to land she asked if she could crash in my spare room while she figured things out. I have plenty of space and I dont need rent from the room, so I said three months tops, get yourself sorted and out.
I told her I wasnt charging rent but asked if she could handle the basic tidying around the house since I work long hours and the place was starting to get away from me, just the dishwasher, hoovering once a week, wiping down the kitchen. Id give her a hundred a week for it, partly to keep things fair and partly so she had some cash in her pocket while she job hunted. She agreed straight away.
This past Friday was payday for her little arrangement. I dropped a hundred on the kitchen counter on my way out the door and she stopped me to say I owed her more, and I asked what she meant.
She told me she had also been doing my herb garden on the back patio, watering and trimming it, which was easily another thirty quid a week. She had filed and sorted through the stack of unopened mail and household paperwork on my dining table too, which at organising service rates was another eighty quid. According to her she was owed two hundred and ten this week, not the hundred I had given her.
I told her I never asked her to touch the herb garden or the mail, and she said all of that fell under "keeping the house in order" so technically I was getting a bargain at the original rate. She got worked up about it and started saying she was being taken advantage of and how this is exactly why she has trust issues with family.
I told her to pack a bag, the three months was being cut short, and she had until the weekend to find somewhere else. She lost it and called everyone in the family to tell them I was throwing her out over money I could easily afford.
The money is honestly not the point, I have it, I would have paid her the extra if shed mentioned doing those things in advance. What disgusted me was the way she came at me with an invoice for things I never asked her to do, after I had given her a roof and a weekly paycheck for two months. AITA?