Why Her Roommates’ Unapproved Living Room Redesign Sparked an All-Out War
Pexels
Sometimes, living with roommates is great. Especially if you’re young. Especially if you enjoy other people’s company. Especially if they’re good people and respectful of your boundaries.
In these cases, living with roommates can give you the freedom to live in a city, even if you don’t have a particularly high wage. Alongside your roommates, you can grow, go through the highs and lows of adult life, and know that there is always someone who will be by your side, or at the very least make you a cup of tea while you cry into your pillow.
More than that though, good roommates do their own share of the chores so that no one has to take care of everything – they keep things clean and tidy, and they are reliable too.
And unsurprisingly, good roommates are quite hard to come by, as the woman in this story found out.
Read on to find out what happened to her.
AITA for asking my roommates to communicate with me?
I (30, female) recently moved in with new roommates (a guy and a woman, both in their twenties). I told them ahead of moving in together that I was bringing furniture and lots of household goods.
I also asked then MANY times prior to moving in if they’d like to go over what to keep and what to get rid of. Neither of them ever responded to my conversation attempts.
There are two bedrooms in the apartment. I asked to have the smaller one which has some built-in storage. This made sense to me, since I was bringing in more stuff and also, I’m only one person. I assumed that they’d rather have the bigger room.
But on move in day, I discovered that they’d taken the smaller room without letting me know there’d been a switch. I asked them to please, in the future, communicate with me about these kinds of big changes.
Let’s see how their living situation went on.
After move in, I set a boundary that I was fine with them using my stuff as long as it was used respectfully and taken care of. But I came in one day to find my female roommate using some of my baking tools in the bathtub for some reason.
When asked why she didn’t check with me before using my stuff in a way that it was obviously not intended to be used, she said “Well, I wasn’t sure if you were home.”
To this I replied, “you have my phone number, facebook messenger, my email, and the ability to knock on the door. Please ask next time.”
We had a house meeting about it and I asked, once again, to be kept in the loop about major apartment changes and to be asked before my stuff is used in a way it wasn’t intended to be used.
But still, things kept changing without her consent.
This morning, I came into the living room to find it completely rearranged without warning. I said I wasn’t cool with random rearrange and asked why I wasn’t given a heads up that it would be happening.
My female roommate said she couldn’t ask me because “I wasn’t home yesterday” – even though I was home.
Once again, I reminded her that she has multiple outlets to communicate with me and I’d asked her to let me know before there were any major changes.
She then claimed that she “didn’t have her phone on her” and that’s why she never reached out, and claimed that she liked it better after the rearranging and I had to deal with it.
By this point, these women were at something of an impasse.
I reiterated that this is my apartment too and that I have a right to have some say in how the common area is arranged.
She said she should be allowed to rearrange any of the furniture any way she wants because “there’s no room for her own furniture in the apartment.” (She owns no other furniture and has never indicated that she wants to buy other furniture, and she ignored all of my attempts to have a conversation about what to keep and what to get rid of when we were moving in.)
I reminded her that she’s never expressed any issue about that before now and that it doesn’t change the fact that I asked to be clued in. Am I wrong for asking to be included in these kinds of house decisions and for asking my roommates to communicate with me?
AITA?
It’s true, this is her living space too and she has every right to be involved.
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
Now, she needs to set some boundaries. Maybe they’re not permitted to use her things any more, after all.
But most of all, given these two seem to repeatedly cross her boundaries, she probably just needs to find a new place to live.
Trending and Popular
Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.
This person thought her roommates were being completely unreasonable.
While others thought she needed to move out.
However, this Redditor thought that she might not be as blameless as she seemed.
The truth is, unless they’re making an effort to communicate, things are never going to go well in this house share. Because communication and boundaries are key, not only to living peacefully beside one another, but to showing that you do actually respect the other folks you live with too. She had asked to be consulted on matters regarding their home, and yet the other woman moved the entire living room around without discussion, her only excuse being that she hadn’t had her phone on her at the time. It just shows how little she respects her.
In reality, this woman is probably going to be happier if she can find somewhere that she can afford to rent on her own – or at least to find a new roommate that is more mature and better at communicating. Because the maturity gap between this woman and the couple that she’s living in is enormous, and it really shows in their behaviour and their regard for her and her possessions. Things have to change now, for her sanity if nothing else.
Trending and Popular
Sign up to get our BEST stories of the week straight to your inbox.
