am in the wrong/being too uptight?
So a little bit of context: last September I moved into an old house with my friend of 10 years and her half-brother after she kicked out her ex-husband and started filing for divorce. The house was built in the late 1800s, had a reno in the 1970s and has basically gone untouched since. When I moved in, there were a lot of projects to take on and a lot of bullshit to clean up and fix because her ex was a trash human being (long story). I'm talking for the first month and a half I lived here, we were scrubbing, cleaning, fixing, moving, and replacing things or throwing them out. In December, we redid the shower in our only full bathroom, and it's still in a "usable and waterproof, but not finished" state 7 months later.
Throughout all of that, I've been contributing a lot. My friend was in debt and behind on the mortgage payment/utilities because her ex fucked with the auto-pay and missed multiple months, and this had also happened with her car payment and some other stuff. Me and her half-brother paid for rent, utilities, plus a little extra for her to put towards paying the overdue fees and buying household items like TP and cleaning supplies. I personally also helped her get her car back when it was repo'd because the car company didn't understand that she works nights and sleeps through the day most days. I've also chipped in a lot financially when it comes to the cleaning of the house and some of our projects, such as the bathroom project in December.
In addition to that, from the time I moved in until about mid-March, I was cleaning the two livable floors of the house weekly. (There are four usable floors, including the attic and basement.)
- I swept, scrubbed, and mopped the entire first floor, which included the kitchen, laundry area, dining room, "foyer" area, and living room. I wiped down the kitchen surfaces too.
- I also did all five cat litter boxes for most of that time, occasionally with help.
- I also deep cleaned the main bathroom three or four times in that time frame for multiple reasons - mold removal (friend can't tolerate bleach), general deep cleans to remove grime and debris from previous shitty housemates (her ex lol, plus his brother), and once or twice to account for her half-brother not doing his singular job of keeping it clean.
Besides that, my friend's half-brother and I also end up caring for her cats and dog about 50% of the time because of her night shift schedule.
Now, with all of that in mind, let me tell you the current predicament:
I had an injury in March, at which point I stopped doing my weekly cleaning frenzies in favor of just barely managing to do my own shit (which I had been barely capable of fitting in with all the other cleaning I was doing from September to March). Around this time, my friend's other half-brother and his roommate had to break their lease to leave their apartment because this brother lost his job due to some really shitty circumstances. The two of them moved into the (livable, but not fully "finished") basement, and our collective "rent" was supposed to decrease.*
(*It was already supposed to have decreased that January, because another friend had temporarily moved into the attic, but she ended up not paying any rent at all due to her financial situation... another long, tangential story.)
After my injury, I texted the group chat to tell them all the things I had been doing, and suggested that everyone pick a chore to do so that the house stayed clean, as I would no longer be doing the majority of the housework. (Mind you, I have a "part-time" full-time job (ifykyk) that takes up the first 2/3 of my day 3-6 days out of the week. It was already a strain to be doing all of that stuff, and I told them this as well.) I wrote up a full list, gave a break-down of how long the tasks usually took me, and said I could write up a chore chart or something if need be.
For a month, no one did anything. Not me, not my friend or her original half-brother housemate, not the other brother or his roommate, and not my friend's not-really-a-boyfriend boyfriend. I went on a camping trip in mid-April, before which I furiously cleaned the gross ass kitchen, did the mountain of dishes, and told people to keep it clean and please put away the dishes while I was gone.
Came back to more dishes in the sink, the mountain of clean stuff not put away, the kitchen back to being an absolute wreck, and the same trash and various personal items cluttering and scattered across the rest of the first floor (courtesy mostly of the not-a-boyfriend). Did the same thing to the bathroom a few weeks later, because the OG half-brother wasn't cleaning it again, and once again posted the list of things I used to do, explained I would not be doing them, that I was starting PT soon and had been swamped at work for months and had actually been asking for more help since February, and let it rest.
It is now early July, and nothing has changed except that the original half brother and I worked out an agreement to switch off weekly on cleaning the main bathroom, and I still have to get on his case to make sure he does it for his week. I rage-cleaned the entire house the second week of June when we kicked out not-a-boyfriend, so things are a lot cleaner than they were when he still "lived" here (read: squatted in the living room and acted like a manchild, basically), but the kitchen is still usually a mess, and my friend has actually gotten worse at taking care of her pets.
I have tried for 3 months now
- to get people to at least take out the trash without being told, and asked them to please take their many, many pizza boxes to the big trash cans outside instead of stacking them on the (full) kitchen trash can.
- I have asked people to please sweep once in a while, if they're not going to put any effort into keeping the floors clean otherwise.
- I have a hard time getting one person to help me keep the bathroom clean. I still sweep the stairs and part of the second floor (landing between 3 bedrooms) whenever I find the fucking time.
- Don't even talk to me about the lawn, man. (Thank god we live in town and its tiny.)
No one else chips in unless my friend yells at them (since she's literally related to some of the people who live here lol) and forces them to help. They guys were supposed to help me rage clean after not-a-boyfriend left, but they drank and got high instead.
Also for context, we have:
- a night nurse
- a mechanic
- two other miscellaneous night shifters
- and me (a postal worker at an understaffed office) all living here.
- There are also a dog and 5 cats, but only 4 are free roam - the other one is mine, and since I got the bigger room when my friend vacated it, he stays in here full-time because he doesn't get along with the other cats and my friend doesn't take care of their spaces well.
- There's also several reptiles, but they live in their respective owners' rooms and obviously don't cause messes or problems the way the dog and cats can.
Oh, and of all the projects we had listed when I moved in? None of those got done besides the shower redo. Also, I wasn't made aware of any of them before I moved in.
- Our electrical is outdated by about 40 years. The breaker box is much newer, but still scares me.
- The wallpaper is all from the 70s remodel. It's peeling so, so bad.
- The floors haven't been sanded and resealed in... god, IDK, decades probably? So every time the dog has an accident on the floor, or the cats pee outside the boxes because my friend doesn't clean them, it soaks into the wood.
- The entire kitchen needs gutted. It's nonfunctional and looks gross, but also everything by the stove and fridge are outdated, like the rest of the house. The ancient linoleum floor is even peeling up, and you can see the old sub-flooring.
- A window busted out in a storm this spring, and it's still only boarded up with plywood.
- The attic, which the temporary live-in friend once lived in, has been trashed by her and her dog. It smells like a barn. It's also insulated.
- Half the windows in the house still need replaced.
Besides even THAT, the house isn't technically in my friend's name. It's still under a lease by her parents, who are still paying it off from the original owner who has since died. We're technically "renting" from her parents, who I guess now hold the mortgage?? So they're technically the landlords, and before that the other guy was, and none of them ever updated or fixed shit!!
So.
This post is part rant, part me begging for help and direction. I can't stand living in a house that's gross - and I don't mean messy. I'm messy, and disorganized, and cluttered, but I'm also clean. The way the house was when my friend's ex left, and when not-a-boyfriend left? That was messy, disorganized, and fucking disgusting. It devolves back into that every time the chores lapse.
I hate cleaning chores. I hate them with passion. I HATE cleaning bathrooms, but not only have a I deep-cleaned this one four or five times due to other people's negligence, but I now clean it every other week. I also despise organizing people and telling them what to do, but I find myself begging the other four residents of the house to do even the bare minimum on a weekly basis - and even then, I just end up doing a crazy, rage-filled, anxious deep-clean of different parts of the house once a month anyway, because no one takes initiative.
Am I being obsessive? Am I being a dick? Am I being pedantic? Yeah probably. But it's either nag people to death or rot in my room because the rest of the house is fucking awful, and I already did the whole "self-isolation" business at home with my parents, and in college with COVID and other bullshit. I want to be able to walk through the house without smelling something gross or wondering how old that animal piss stain is.
What do I even do in this situation? Can I do anything, besides move out? (I'm planning to move out around the one-year mark, into an apartment with a friend I trust more and know the living habits of lol.) Am I overreacting or do I really live with a bunch of people who don't give a shit about themselves or the people/animals they live with?
I'm just... at a loss. I've tried offering help, and suggestions, and for months I was the one doing the work no one wanted to do. None of the necessary projects have even been started, let alone completed, which stressful considering one project involves century-old electrical wiring.
I've also managed to piss everyone off this week by dropping the nice act and telling people to get their shit together, clean up their own messes, etc, and had a lengthy conversation with my friend about what she needs to do better to keep her animals healthy and safe (which just frustrated her more).
Also, I have pictures if people need context for how gross things have been/are in parts of the house. I'll share if asked, but I don't want to throw them in here outright, I guess. I'm already a little afraid one of my housemates still uses reddit and could find this and make the connections.
Anyway.... uh, hopefully this is entertaining in some way at least? If nothing else, reading about someone running around like a chicken with its head cut off has got to be amusing for someone. Hopefully some of y'all can at least give me advice about it? Thanks in advance. I'm going to go rot on my floor for a bit.