Sometimes, no matter our intentions, life lands us in some truly unfortunate situations. After all, life is a balance of ups and downs, and with some determination (and hopefully some supportive friends around us) we simply have to make the best of whatever life has thrown at us. Sometimes this comes in the form of finding new income after being laid off, a new place to live after a breakup or even a natural disaster, or making a new life plan when a spanner in the works makes our current one untenable.

Though the college freshman in this story wasn’t going through anything permanent or life-changing, she did have to face a living situation that made her own daily life both unpredictable, at times miserable, and sometimes even unsafe. She did her very best to live with it, but when things were getting progressively worse, she started banking information in her mind, ready for any opportunity to enact a change. So when the opportunity presented itself, she was ready.

Read on to find out what happened.

Roommates don’t respect my boundaries, I get them evicted in less than a day.

For my freshman year of college, I went through a long process with my school to be able to live off campus as a freshman (normally this is not allowed, but they made an exception due to circumstances).

I moved in on a lease takeover as a girl to an all-boy apartment. It was a four bedroom apartment that individually leased each room, but two rooms shared one bath and all shared a kitchen, living room and laundry room.

This place is was GROSS when I moved in, but I cleaned it up and got it liveable enough.

I grew up with brothers and had no problem with dudes as long as they were decently respectful. Plus I had the kitchen to myself. I’m also an engineering student and asked them if they had their friends over to let me know beforehand or keep the music below bed-rattling.

Let’s see how things were while living with these guys.

Turns out, this exact apartment was known as the party apartment, and I would soon find out why.

I was working eight to twelve hour shifts at retail, and then going to school full time. One day I came home at 11 pm exhausted to blasting music, and so many people they were streaming out the front door.

I WAS ******. Luckily each room locks with a deadbolt and I remembered to lock mine before I left for work. There were easily fifty people there.

As a 20 year old who just wanted to sleep, I did the only rational thing I could. I packed an overnight bag, locked my room and called a friend with an SOS and slept there.

But what she discovered down the line made her really uncomfortable.

I found out later that one of my roommates was dealing, only three people were of legal drinking age, and 1 girl was fourteen?!?! The girlfriend of one of my roommates was still in high school and invited all of her friends, who invited more people. The cops busted the party but luckily didn’t card anyone so no one was arrested.

Now I felt like I could still reasonably deal with this. But then they started to use my things in the kitchen, stealing my food – and the last straw was when they dented my kitchen knives that I had just purchased. Brand new knives that now had nicks in the blade like they sword fought with them.

Mind you, I communicated all of my grievances that weren’t super minor (like using my laundry soap) with them and asked that my boundaries be respected.

And yet, their guests would throw up and poop in the toilet. They would try to enter my room to use my bed while I was sleeping. The girlfriend of one even ended up coming into my room to stare at me (I woke up) when I forgot to lock my door, to tell me four people were coming over. My food and my items were still being taken and damaged and I grew tired of it all.

Let’s see how she tried to deal with these situations.

I attempted to befriend the various roommates in an effort to get them to be more courteous, but the information I got was even better. Remember how I was a lease takeover? Yeah, our apartment not only required the necessary paperwork, they also required a lease takeover FEE.

I found out that my roommates were FRIENDS of the people on the lease. Their friends upgraded to a different apartment complex and didn’t want to pay that fee. My roommates hadn’t paid the takeover fee or signed any paperwork putting them on the lease. So the original lease holder wasn’t living there. I kept this information for later.

A few weeks passed and the parties were smaller, but still happening. Then one day I was discussing painting my room due to the marks on the walls from the previous tenants. Our apartment allowed you to paint if it was 1) approved first or 2) you painted it back before move-out.

The maintenance guys were super sweet and let me pick a custom colour for my room (a pretty light-sky-blue), bought it for me, and helped me paint my room. My roommates find out I painted and asked about it, but I didn’t know what would happen later.

Read on to find out how they reacted to the news.

They didn’t paint their room, they spray painted it. Not with any vulgar or even gang symbols, but spray painted it all the same. The parties continued, but now they let their guests sign the walls in various sharpies. This was the moment I realised was the time. I ended up taking pictures of the room on Snapchat and saved them to my camera roll.

I knew that my apartment complex wouldn’t do anything about the parties and could even blame me for the underage kids. Plus the items I stored in the common areas were fair game according to legal terms about a shared space.

I first spoke with the building manager about the parties. I was right, there wasn’t anything I could do but call the cops. I could complain all I wanted about the condition of the house, my roommates, and the theft and damage of my belongings and they wouldn’t do anything.

They didn’t even seem bothered when I spoke to them about two of the four of us living there not being on the lease (the other one that was on my side was chill and I didn’t have a problem with). As long as rent was paid on time, it seemed they weren’t going to do anything.

So she resorted to the other information she had stored away.

After all this, I pulled out my camera roll and told this nice lady to scroll as long as she wanted, as I took about fifteen pictures of just the one room. She got mad and started babbling on and on about “gang graffiti” and how she wouldn’t have it.

I knew there were no gang symbols whatsoever on the walls, just dumb kids, but it didn’t look good. So I didn’t correct her, and reminded her that the rooms in question were the ones who weren’t even legal tenants there.

I locked as much as I could remember to grab of my things from the kitchen in my bedroom beforehand, and was headed straight to work so I didn’t get to see the devastation when two office workers evicted them in HOURS.

They weren’t the legal tenants and had clearly stayed over the seven day guest limit. They had to pack up as much as they could and were out by the time I got home from my shift ten hours later.

Read on to find out what happened in the aftermath.

I got a lot of hateful and threatening messages from the girlfriend of one of them. I don’t remember the exact words as this was a few years ago and I didn’t save it for more than a year – though I did save them once she started threatening me with stalking and physical harm. I stayed polite and neutral in my responses in case I would need to take them to court.

They did get one small revenge in that I remembered to lock up my pots, but in my hurry I forgot the lids. They stole my lids to all cookware—even my crockpot. They also took all my food they could grab and put it in the now-topless crockpot with ALL of my spices too and left it on. I’m not sure what liquid was used, and I don’t ever want to know.

But I ended up paying the rent of a one bedroom for a four bedroom place when the last roommate’s lease ended a few months later (the rooms were leased individually). Also the now-former roommates’ friends that WERE on the lease had to come in clean and re-paint the walls white.

Do you know what happens when you put water-based white paint over red and black colored permanent marker? He eventually hired a guy to make it look right. I heard it took nine plus layers in some areas, and others were entirely spackled over super thick.

Let’s see how the real lease holders treated her.

I felt bad for the original lease holders as they were now stuck with the damages, had to repaint and still had to pay rent on this apartment. I had met with and was cool with them.

I even tried helping one guy paint a bunch and told him I had no beef with him. I apologized for the way things had worked out and he wasn’t happy with me but also didn’t blame me.

I reason it with they knew they were breaking the terms of their lease and exactly who their friends were when they didn’t transfer the lease. If they hadn’t repainted the room the way they did, the complex manager wouldn’t have done ANYTHING.

It’s sad that this all fell on this student to deal with.

Sure the structure for freshmen to live on campus is there for a reason but sometimes that doesn’t work out, and she deserved a safe place to live and study from.

It sucks that the building management didn’t care until all of the criminal damage occurred.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a landlord who learned the hard way not to try to keep a security deposit he should have paid.

Let’s see how folks on Reddit responded to this.

This person felt the pain of covering over all that marker and spray paint.

While others shared helpful tips.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought she should have expected what happened.

The truth is, it’s clear that she didn’t know the people she was moving in with, and was just placed in this apartment off campus. She certainly didn’t choose to live in a party apartment, and it wasn’t her fault that she wound up in such an awful situation.

It is basic decency to at least warn your roommates that you’re having big parties if you know they’re not the partying type, but the state that they left the apartment in would have been difficult for even the most accepting of people to take – and that’s without even beginning to consider the disruption to her sleep, studying, and day-to-day life. Waking up to someone watching you sleep is never a nice experience.

But what makes this even worse is the fact that the roommates – who didn’t even have a lease – took such petty revenge on her before they left, with the constant threats from the girlfriend bordering on criminal. No one deserves what she went through.