Crap Your Roommate Does/Has Done in Past That Drive You Batty

1. Do nothing but watch movies all day with your surround sound blaring so that to enjoy television in my own room I have to put it on volume 80

fuck roommates

^^^ annoying if it's against yr will

fuck roommates

― call all destroyer, Saturday, October 9, 2010 12:19 PM (33 seconds ago)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

what to do when your roommate doesn't realize you're home and thusly is having loud sex in the living room

leaving the sponge in water in the sink.

2. Tease me for exercising 4-5 days a week while he never leaves the house, exercises, or does much of anything besides go to work.
3. Criticize my diet unsolicited because I eat 'tv dinners' (even though I eat healthy ones), proceed to tell me I don't eat enough vitamins, and give me all these health tips despite being massively overweight and out of shape himself, and being someone who pretty much only eats chicken daily.

I like the dude, we're friends and all, and just cuz he's not fit doesn't discount his advice, but it's like man, if yer gonna be smug, you might wanna at least resemble the comments you're making.

ew at the sponge thing

After just sweeping up countless cigarette butts and shards of broken beer bottles on the balcony, this thread is relevant.

oh ffs that's ridiculous. the cig butts are bad enough (if not worse actually) but broken beer bottles? blech

the fact that he doesn't consider any cleanup as necessary when his kid stays over- everything else that needs doing just stops for three days a week. but it's getting better tbh. general slovenliness besides

so this week my collective house:

- has officially became a nonprofit cooperative
- has three different kinds of legal meetings related to purchasing the house
- has to interview 6 potential new roommates
- is on the verge of dissolving on account of emotions running high over the long term direction of the house, and how formally institutional we want to become

i hate everything

That sounds awful. I mean, probably good long term goals there, but I just cannot imagine coming home from a shitty day at work to have to immerse myself in MORE meeting and legal-ese.

My housemate's a nice guy but...

1. Girlfriend slowly moves in, gets given a key to the house, often in when he's not in. My partner doesn't get these privileges because she doesn't pay the rent either.
2. Putting really tasteless artwork up around the house, stuff that's really obviously been purchased from the Family Bargains store or a car boot sale. I haven't the heart to take it down but I suspect a lot of it's been informed by factor 1.

Hoos, what are the advantages of incorporating your house as a coop?

keep pigeons in it.

Oh my god, I really like you Justin and you're welcome to eat my vintage mature cheddar, but please start putting it back in the fridge after you're done as it goes hard, cracked and inedible if left on the counter overnight.

Also can we occasionally watch a movie that isn't Hollywood action/horror without you rolling your eyes all the way through.

Hoos, what are the advantages of incorporating your house as a coop?

― how's life, Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:36 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we'll be an entity that can secure a mortgage, as opposed to 7 transient individuals whose signatures would make them individually liable

also qualifies us to get fiscal sponsorship, so that donations to our program activities are tax deductible

cool.

That sounds awful. I mean, probably good long term goals there, but I just cannot imagine coming home from a shitty day at work to have to immerse myself in MORE meeting and legal-ese.

― djenter the dragon? (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:26 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and this is an especially stressful week at work too

boss found my printout of the house's capital needs assessement sitting on the printer before i could get to it and she said 'its fine to make use of the office resources, but don't let this project take up too much of your mental real estate while you're at your desk' and i was like IF YOU ONLY KNEW

Constantly cooking stuff at home, leaving oil-soaked dishes in sink for a days, then when the sink starts having trouble, getting another roommate to call the landlord to complain. Landlord sends everyone a long text about not doing this and asks who will chip in and take care of this. Me and the roommate he got to call the landlord end up buying Draino and pouring it in all the drains in the house and fixing the problem for him. Yay.

I would be the world's worst scolding-parent type of roommate.

so Hoos, you guys previously rented the house, and the landlord sold it collectively to the tenants, or just to one or two who operate it and rent to the others? Totally unfamiliar w/how this works, but I've been trying to buy a stake in the quadplex I now rent but not sure how to approach it.

well we're sort of a special case--there's no precedent for what we're doing in DC law, which is why our legal team is so excited.

but yeah in short:

- the collective has existed in the house since 1974
- the owner of the house allowed the rent to stay well below market rate bcz she supported the collective
- in 2003 the owner of the house (and the founder of the collective, in an unrelated twist) died
- ownership of the house reverted to a trust, "as was the style at the time" say our lawyers
- the heirs spent 10 years in court trying to have us evicted so they could sell the house at market rate, while we argued that as long standing tenants we had (under DC law) 'right of first refusal' ie that we had the option to buy the home before it was put on the market
- a month ago we finally signed a settlement to that effect, that we have until mid july to secure financing for the house

so now we're:

- forming a cooperative
- running a crowdfunding campaign to pay expenses required to secure the mortgage
- ramping up our programming activity (figure drawing, panel discussions, poetry workshops, book clubs, art builds, shows for touring bands) hard so that we're super visible on an organizational level

whoops, here's that crowdfunding link again: www.indiegogo.com/at/lscdc

we argued that as long standing tenants we had (under DC law) 'right of first refusal' ie that we had the option to buy the home before it was put on the market

That's the angle I'm trying to work too, but need to learn how this law works, as the value of this house has skyrocketed 4x since I moved here several years ago due to a shady developer trying to buy every nearby house so she can tear them down and build a generic apartment complex on the land. We have first dibs on buying the house, but we can't afford it at the recent going rate, even though rental prices have been stagnant during that time.

I've been checking ot the LSC website for the last few minutes - wow, you're only stone's throw from here. Don't have much $ to contribute, but I work in home renovation so maybe could throw in some labor. Also have a roomful of high-end appliances and kitchen/bathroom fittings from a renovation project that fell through that I could donate, hit me up if you need a stove or washing machine.

wow - Hoos, that's a crazy undertaking.

it's one of the most demanding things i've ever done, even without this recent turmoil erupting in the midst of our most important push.

there's a definite divide between residents who see the house as a living space that sometimes invites the community in, vs. residents who want the house to be a strictly defined community-facing organization that happens to house the volunteers who run it. it's sort of the divide between people who see activism as something you pursue out of passion, or something you pursue as a career path--the latter folks are looking for a reason to put the house on their LinkedIn profile, i suspect.

i'm pretty painfully on the fence--i think the organizational model is the one we have to adopt if we want to be successful at buying the house and building a real community base, but i also think becoming a more stringently defined organization means leaving behind a lot of what has made the house such a special place for the last 40 years. if we start demanding portfolios of people's art and organizing work before we let them move in, we'll be eligible for more grants--but we're sacrificing a lot.

so this stuff is tough.

get tiny hosue and hoave no housemate!!

so this stuff is tough.

― purposely lend impetus to my HOOS (BIG HOOS aka the steendriver), Thursday, May 1, 2014 6:57 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so we're now doing weekly house group therapy, basically, to get past this

i have sort of begun to feel like i live in a portlandia sketch

Get out while you still can.

house group therapy?

dude you need to move

keeps trying to kiss me during sex

oh man I was just telling my (social work internship) supervisor that I can't really envision going into private practice as a therapist, HOWEVER being a group-house-therapy specialist in DC may change my mind about that.

house group therapy?

dude you need to move

― Οὖτις, Thursday, May 29, 2014 10:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nah man, i'm savin this ship or going down with it.

essentially what we're dealing with here are personality conflicts that are manifesting as disagreements about the direction of the house. this is especially frustrating to me because the two people at the center of the fighting were supposed to be the other two members of my ~transformation team~, the people i believed most had the vision and energy to push this thing through with me with the functional support of the rest of the house--but instead those two no longer trust each other. without our solid, committed and driven core its hard for any one of us to summon the desire to get the hard work done or delegate effectively.

do personality conflicts get elevated into / become emblematic of political fights? is it just too much radicalism?

do either (or both) of these people have control issues? I have a somewhat similar situation in the show co-op space I am a part of

you know, it seems like there should be some sort of solution that's in between the 2 extremes, a moderate solution that requires compromise from both sides. a solution that's in the middle, where most of America is. a "Third Way"

but in all seriousness i hope you guys find a way to work it out. for a lot of people the home is a place to escape the tensions of everyday life, so to have that tension carry over into your off-work hours must be frustrating. :-/

do personality conflicts get elevated into / become emblematic of political fights? is it just too much radicalism?

― Mordy, Friday, May 30, 2014 1:16 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think so, yes--though i'm not sure this is endemic to our political orientation as much as it's a thing people do to displace the real source of their conflicts.

do either (or both) of these people have control issues? I have a somewhat similar situation in the show co-op space I am a part of

― sarahell, Friday, May 30, 2014 1:17 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think they're both people who are accustomed to having their energy overwhelm the preferences of everyone else in the room--this has led to a variety of problems, because at present the house is largely made up of people inclined to be deferential, so a conflict over who to defer to is forcing everyone to reckon with the long term implications of the two different approaches.

but in all seriousness i hope you guys find a way to work it out. for a lot of people the home is a place to escape the tensions of everyday life, so to have that tension carry over into your off-work hours must be frustrating. :-/

― go to evangelical agonizing eternal hell (Karl Malone), Friday, May 30, 2014 1:20 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha three nights this week we've come home to long difficult meetings

last night walked directly in from storm, soaked panting & fleeing lightning, into a two hour legal meeting and series of decisions about the makeup of our board of directors

after 10 hour work day

what would be the simplest thing to do? Is one of the approaches more complicated/expensive/harder to change than the other?

Dude the two people I lived with from a commune like that were huge pain in the ass drama queens that used to decide house stuff behind everyone else's back. Transparency is of UTMOST IMPORTANCE.

Good news about the dishwashing troubles I was having a few months ago, it was the straw that broke the camel's back for my landlord and he's now selling the house which means we all have to leave. But at least we weren't using that nasty dishwasher!

hey hoos

ik commune and shit

but have you considered violence

what would be the simplest thing to do? Is one of the approaches more complicated/expensive/harder to change than the other?

― sarahell, Friday, May 30, 2014 1:34 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the simplest thing to do would have been for us to agree to have slightly looser criterion for who we house in our mission statement. that way people who weren't explicitly artists or activists would still have a place. the discord is being driven primarily by one housemate who thinks that for a host of good reasons (eligibility for grants, genuine mission-drivenness, defining the identity of the house) we *need* that kind of stringent specificity in our legal documents, so that we'd 'only' house artists and activsts, and we'd do things like ask for portfolios for new applicants. throughout this whole process the housemate in q has insisted that if we don't honestly examine our mission in this way then we have no organizational integrity, and because we're all so devoted to the history of this house and the reputation required to solicit funding from people honestly, that hits us all right in the soft spot we need to consider these questions the long way.

but its too late for the simplest option.

Is it possible to require a submission of a creative portfolio or activist agenda from prospective new roommates to maintain elegibility for grants, whilst still choosing new applicants based on their overall compatibility, likeability, reliability, and other more conventional factors for bringing in new flatmates, even if their artistic abilities weren't as good some other applicants? That is, adopt stricter guildlines for being a tenant to show the lawyers and zoning-compliance jurisdiction et.al. that the house is indeed a sort of non-profit organization that some people live in, even though those portfolios may be rudimentary in some cases and would not be the determinant of who is brought in to live there, but just enough to show you're being honest about the co-op's purpose and significance? (or something like that....)

So for legal and financial-protection purposes the house becomes an institutional entity, giving the tenants ownership, but also allows the previous lifestyle and values to mostly continue as they were?

good luck hoos

xxp - have any of these grants even been applied for, or is this just speculation?

What you could do, that would be a bit of a compromise, is to focus the mission on the activities and events the house would do, as opposed to the residents. From my experience, the things that would ostensibly be "public" are what would appeal most to funders (caveat - I am coming from the arts as opposed to social work/social justice, so those funders might have different goals). You could have some sort of residency program, where one or two rooms in the house are awarded based on applications and portfolios, and those people would conduct activities/programs or just work on things on their own.