i am not tidy by any means.
nor particularly clean. But i think that normal for boys. this story relates to someone else

a mature relative used to run a cafe. and house stray animals. not the greatest combination but my folks stopped taking me round for christmas visits when they spotted a cat shitting on the display of choclate bars and were told "oh they do that all the time. i just wipe them off".

so.. if you were in a cafe in the lakes during the late 70's i'd go get tests. i wish this wasn't true.
(DreddPirateBob has watched every scifi film ever on, Sat 27 Mar 2010, 9:01, Reply)

Mice, lots of mice
We used to visit this old guy who lived in a tin shack on a huge farm. He was doing quite well, but never really felt the need to change his way of life. All the food was piled on a pedestal table in the middle of the room. Asides from being messy, it meant only the most determined mice could get to it. Mice scurried in the dust all around us as we had some tea.

Dad actually stayed the night once. The guy dutifully went to make up the guest bedroom. Dad reckons that when he fluffed the blankets maybe a hundred mice disappeared in every direction. Practical sort of guy that dad is, he just rolled his sleeping bag out on top and made sure it was zippered tight to keep the mice out.
(xixax, Sat 27 Mar 2010, 8:38, Reply)

My Ex Mother in Law's House
Was always immaculate. Her OCD regarding dust, carpets, air quality et al was constantly switched on.

Such was her view of sterility that she would ask her son who was farting to go to the bathroom.

We were having a picnic lunch in the garden at the time!
( fagilliD Fuck I'm good!, Sat 27 Mar 2010, 2:06, Reply)

Last Year
A friend asked me to help him move out of his flat and into a larger house.
I've known the guy for ages so I was more than happy to help
Even though we had been friends for years I'd never seen the inside of his flat, When picking him up in the car he would always be waiting outside, I thought It was a bit odd but didn't think much of it at the time.
The reason he always waited outside became clear as soon asI i set foot inside on that warm summers day.
The Kitchen was a complete wreck, beer cans and pizza boxes covered what you could see of the floor, the same goes for the work surfaces, I think there was a sink - couldn't see for all the mess.

The story was the same in the living room / bedroom but the pizza boxes were joined by unwashed t shirts and boxer shorts.

The worst part however was the smell, Imagine putting your head inside a dustbin that hasn't been emptied for a few weeks and you're about halfway there.

Mr Trebus would of been proud.
( Terry Oblong There's nobody here but us chickens on, Sat 27 Mar 2010, 0:42, Reply)

Happy holidays.
I had the pleasure of visiting Butlins in early December for thankfully a non-ususal Butlins type break.
We had a self catering chalet and on the first night sat in the 'lounge' and as the sun went down closed the curtains.
Something caught my eye. I crept forward wondering what the hell it was on the curtains.
As I looked closer I couldn't help but start to laugh. It was egg shell. Well really the best part of a whole egg stuck there. Someone must of had an egg fight and Butlins cleaning staff has clearly done a thorough job of deep cleaning before we arrived.
Never let it be said that British holiday camps are not what you expect.
It delivered in full.
A real ..'home from home'
( Herb Alpert's Taxi Driver I have very beautiful lips, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 23:32, Reply)

Ugh
We have a family friend who is one of those compulsive hoarders you see sometimes on TV; she has a beautiful 3 story brownstone and lives entirely in the front room on the ground floor, as every other room is packed to the ceiling with rubbish. As I and my brother were unemployed we were volunteered by our mother to help her clear some space and reclaim a few rooms.

There were all the usual horrors that one would find in a hoarder's tomb: magazines from 1993, dollar-store ornaments, jars of paint, all thickly coated with a literal inch of caked dust and dog hair from her enormous St. Bernard. Among the most vile were a dessicated mouse that had been under a pile of rubbish so heavy for so long that it had been flattened to the thickness of a bookmark, and a full-blown mouse nest that was in the middle of the bedroom floor underneath a pile of clothes that had been reduced to rags at its core. Like all hoarders, our friend seizes the stinking, filthy, disease-riddled shredded items and puts them aside for later use.

Probably the most surreal part of this dungeon delve was the discovery that, for at least ten years, she had been compulsively purchasing fabric. ENTIRE BOLTS of fabric, from wholesalers and ordering them online. We pulled out as many as we could find, hundreds of yards in every color and texture imaginable, almost all of them filthy and sodden. What she was planning on doing with them, we'll never know.

Sorry there's no punchline, it was just a series of sickening and weird discoveries that I'd rather not dwell upon.
(Galemp makes FreeSpace better, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 21:57, 2 replies)

video of our student house.
living here has driven me mad. im a 23 yrold girl living with two first year boys. we dont agree on cleaning. I think we should do it frmo time to time and they dont.
This is a video of houw our house looks every few days. aarrrggghhhh!

(21 secs in for kitchen goodness...)

www.facebook.com/#!/video/video.php?v=248129869954
(Emily Salvage, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 21:44, 6 replies)

Shitholes
I've been to a few whilst on my travels.

SHITHOLE #1: Sandfields Estate, Port Talbot

The sign on the door said something along the lines of "This house is for the benefit of our dogs, if you don't like it - tough" which gave a clue as to what lay within.

You know when people have an outhouse that they've been keeping coal in? That grimy dirtiness? Well in this case it wasn't the outhouse. It was the hallway. Proceed into the living room, admire the shelves that have been attached to the walls with a nail gun, and settle down on the brown (may or may not be its natural colour) carpet to do my work.

Now one of my work tools is an anti-static mat. It stops things getting zapped by static. It stops me leaving bits of wire everywhere. It stops me burning a hole in your carpet with my soldering iron. In this case it had a fourth purpose: it keeps my knees off your carpet.

SHITHOLE #2: Loughor, Near Swansea

Doesn't look as bad as shithole #1, but looks can be deceiving. I kneel down on the floor to get to work and - aaaagh, what's that seeping through my jeans? Dog piss, that's what.

I ended up kneeling on an anti-static bag for the duration of the job. Once I left I made a bee-line for Tesco as my jeans were absolutely BUZZING. Straight to the clothes aisles, bought my first ever pair of 501s, went straight to the toilets and changed into them. The jeans went in the bag and straight in the wash when I got home. The antistatic bag, which had served its master well for several months, was a lost cause and went in the bin.

SHITHOLE #3: Godreaman, Aberdare

You get some places where you could eat your dinner off the floor. Others look like somebody's beaten you to it. This fell into the latter category.

Now my house is a tip, but at least any bits found in the carpet are bits of plastic, metal, wood and the like, as I'm still doing the house up years after moving in. This house had carpet like mine, but replace all the bits of DIY detritus with bits of food and you get the picture. They can't have had a dog, 'cos a terrier would feast for a week on the contents of the living room flooring. Another "kneel on the mat" moment for me.

SHITHOLE #4: Cwmbran

This was a repair job in a bedroom, overlooking the main road and the shopping centre. All I'll say is the sheets on this lad's bed clearly hadn't been changed in a looooong time. As in "ever". The sheets were the same colour as the background of the "Main Board, Talk Board, etc." bar at the top of this page, or maybe a little darker.

SHITHOLE #5: Treorchy, Rhondda

The money spent on the gardenful of inflatable Christmas decorations would be better spent on a vacuum cleaner and a bottle of Flash All-Purpose, as you could smell the house from outside the front door. No mat required on this job, so managed to work by squatting down, my feet were the only thing that were going to touch THAT floor!

I've kept a pot of Vick's Vapo-rub in the car in the past, to rub under my nostrils when visiting such "problem places" like the coroners do. Every time I've visited this one though, I've forgotten the pot. Bugger.

I had to use the loo there on one occasion. Bath was crammed full of washing, so goodness knows where they put that when they want to actually USE the bath, anything that hit the floor would have to go on a boil wash!

If I can think of any more shitholes I've visited I'll be sure to post them here.
( eXOBeX, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 20:38, 5 replies)

House was deemed lethal..
I am a licensed rescue agent for pitbulls,dobermans,rotts, mastiff breeds and bulldogs. I also seemed to have become the one to call when a giant breed needs help, aka pyrs,st bernards, danes etc.
That means I always have dogs in the house, sometimes Lots of dogs.
3 months ago I had 5 rescued pitbulls, a mastiff mix, 3 dobermans and a pregnant rottie along with my own dogs which are a great pyrenees and a neaopolitan.
I have a smallish house only 1500 sq ft so it sometimes seems the stray dog hairs take over. I vacuum every other day to try to keep the hairs from mutating and taking over. I have a Dyson heavy duty vacuum (if u dont have one,you should get one, there is NO other vaccuum that can come close to cleaning as well if you have dogs with long hair like a st bernard or a pyrenees) I could totally do a commerical for them, wore out a hoover ,a shop vac, a 300 doller sears vacuum in less then a year,this Dyson has lasted 4 years now wheeeee.
ok enough friggin backround, I had always thought my house was resonably clean, I do dust once a week,I am not a fanatic about dusting more then that and dishes must be done immediately after meals and all the dogs food and water bowls are cleaned in the dishewasher daily too.
I have to renew my certification for the property every 5 years so had an inspector come over to do the deed.
He came to check my fence height, made sure my gate locked so nobody could get in and harm my pits or steal something, check food quality etc. His assistant was checking the house while we were in the yard.When it was all checked out to he came in sat at my kitchen table to sign the certification and within a couple minutes started acting funny,his lips were swelling and suddenly his whole head seemed to puff up like a balloon and he fell to the floor started kicking around and garbling and knocked me over and then quit breathing. I broke my back and leg in a skiijouring accident and still wear a huge corset type brace and big leg cast that will not allow me to bend easily,so I couldn't get down to do full CPR very efficiently and his assistant just stood there sobbing and screaming but would not help.
By the time ambulance came the inspector was dead. The hospital later said that my house was so full of dog allergins that it was actually lethal.
I still got my certification,but now has to post a big red warning sign on my outer yard stating there are alot of dogs inside.
I feel bad, but the guy should never have come into my house if he was allergic sheesh..Stupid government inspectors.
(zhinka If you don't rescue,don't breed!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 20:15, 1 reply)

You know its time to put some harpic down your loo when..
A housemates girlfriend contracts cystitis from having to use the local hole in the wall pub's toilets because they are cleaner than the one in your house.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 18:51, 11 replies)

Hello Kitty.
In my final year as a student my house was fairly clean. But we lived opposite a crazy cat lady.

Crazy cat lady did not live alone, but with a browbeaten husband and a equally crazy adult daughter. The house was packed with the paint splattered accessories to the husbands odd job man trade, and tasteless cat related knickknacks.

Cat lady and daughter would have daily screaming rows that result in house wrecking smash fests that usually resulted in the police turning up. This would usually leave the house in a state of advanced disrepair.

How do I know this? you ask. The reason is thus, they never closed their curtains. In the front window surrounded by constantly on Christmas lights like a shrine to mental illness was a yard high light-up hello kitty. This cast a pink shine day and night, like a beacon to the crazy mess inside.
( willenium Fist bump for verification, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 18:48, Reply)

Rat Woman
I have never been inside rat-woman's house but I have been to the front door. That's far enough. Too far, in fact. You have to make sure you're not wearing synthetic clothing or the stench welds the fabric together.

I would like to say that she is known as rat-woman because she has rat-like superpowers, or a mild interest in rats, or even that she looks like whiskery, pointy-nosed scamperer, but no - she is called rat-woman because she breeds rats. Hundreds of the fuckers. I think it's for show, or animal experimentation or something, I don't know. But having bleach dripped into your eyes would be preferable to living in that house, that's for sure.

We were taking some tree seedlings out that were growing way too close to our house and offered to do the same in her garden. She agreed and so we popped through her broken-down fence. I don't know whether you have ever looked into the back-room of your average rather rundown suburban semi and seen floor-to-ceiling rats. Well I have, and I don't recommend it. There were cages literally filling her sitting room and although she may have quite a few in cages, there must be many more living wild in her house because there was seed and food everywhere.

She told us the other day that her daughter doesn't bring her baby round to visit all that often. I wonder why? Doesn't want the crawler to catch bubonic plague I would imagine.

So there you have it - you may have lived in some student dives, and your other-half's folks may not have habits entirely to your taste, but count yourself lucky that your mother-in-law doesn't have a house that the council visit in full-body bio-hazard gear. I shit you not.
( Ugi , it's a game of give and cake, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 18:35, 2 replies)

this is the tip of the iceberg.
my housemate/landlord/buddy finally tracked down the cause of the sporadic small puddle in the middle of the upstairs bathroom floor- a slight drip from the cold water inlet pipe to the cistern.
he decided to sort it out, man-style with molegrips. when this precipitated a more insistent drip, he wrapped an old towel round it, and said nothing, instead opting to come out to london with us.

upon returning home to my downstairs bedroom, at 4 am, wanting bed, i was unable to get the light to turn on. assuming a blwon bulb i stepped into the room, to hear a squelch.
as it transpired, the water had been pissing through the ceiling for some time, rendering some, ooh, let me see, six or seven YEARS worth of design work in portfolios under the bed and sketchbook and negatives and prints and stuff TOTALLY FUCKED. also taking a hit for the team- my mattress, bedding, curtains, carpet, etc.
the house insurers EVENTUALLY fixed it, however, for a year, i had a ceiling that looked like a tramp's gusset, and clumps of fungus growing out of it.
my favourite one looked remarkably like the ear they grew on a mouse some years back.
click if you think i should punch him in the cock.
(UppityDamnPrimate LET'S OPEN THIS F*CKING PIT UP, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 17:34, Reply)

My Mum's brother...
now departed these many years, had lost both his legs due to diabetes and refusing to look after himself.

When the first leg went he could still walk with a zimmer frame but when the second was also removed he spent all his days sat in an electric wheelchair.

He had ramps etc to get to the bathroom and a urine bottle like from a hospital to save him going to the bathroom all the time

His electric wheelchair broke. A lot. One engineer came round to fix it and was nearly boaking as what had caused it to break down was urine getting into the workings. And stinking.

When Uncle ***** died, all the carpets had to be replaced as they were soaking in urine, in fact a couple of floorboards had rotted.

Oh and the walls and ceiling were a nice mustard colour from all the smoking.

The really shocking thing? (we lived in Germany so couldn't be there to look after him) He had TWO home helps. The only things they helped him do were strip his house of all the decent upstairs furniture/ stuff of any value/helped him spend his incapacity benefit. They certainly didn't clean up or assist him in any way.

Yes he could have done better for himself than piss everywhere, probably. I imagine that depression from losing his legs might have made him care a little bit less about all that sort of stuff.
I still maintain that someone that lets it all go that bad is crying for help just as much as someone that slits their wrists. Hardly anyone cares though about a middle aged man with no legs stinking of piss. Certainly not the Forces Benevolent Fund my Mum begged for help. He was a veteran, after all is said and done.

I feel sorry for the poor cunts that bought the house after he died. They got a right bargain on it but Jesus...
( Sallyrsm, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 17:26, 4 replies)

I moved into my new home
The old lady who used to live there had died/gone to live in an old people's home/been abducted by aliens.

The house had been empty for some time and I attributed this as the cause of the musty smell which wouldn't go away. I moved in during November and sitting in the house shivering with all of the windows wide open for several days only brought temporary relief, the smell kept coming back.

First I tackled the bathroom, I threw out the carpet which was a bit piss-stained and scrubbed the floorboards and the toilet. The smell remained. The downstairs carpets were old and grubby so I replaced those, also the stair and landing carpets, I wasn't exactly rich and the bedroom carpets looked clean and quite new so I left them. Still the odour lingered. I gave a lick of paint to all of the walls and the woodwork but my house still stank.

I was now at the point where the only thing that I hadn't scrubbed/replaced/decorated were the bedroom carpets. They looked clean and quite new but I couldn't think what else to do so I moved my bed and furniture out of the way and peeled back the carpet in the main bedroom. There was a plastic sheet underneath between the carpet and the underlay. "Funny" I thought as I continued to pull the carpet towards the opposite wall. I kept going and revealed a puddle sitting in the middle of the plastic sheet, my eyes began to water as a blast of ammonia hit my face. It was a puddle of old dear wee and it was still wet. Somehow it had been trapped betwixt the carpet and the plastic sheet and hadn't evaporated. I had never noticed any damp probably because my bed had been placed directly over said puddle from the day I moved in. I think the relatives of the old biddy must have had the carpet cleaned as like I said previously, several times: it looked clean and quite new, there was no big crusty, pissy stain.

I carefully removed the old carpet, plastic sheet and underlay, scrubbed the bedroom floor, put down a new carpet and finally!
My house smelt good.
( stopmeandslapme Cometh the hour, cometh your mum, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 17:05, Reply)

I had a housemate who, like most friends in this particular QOTW, was disgusting.

He once burped / vomited a spring roll / beer pulp into his hand, then slurped it back in again.

He had decided to make duck spring rolls several days previous. He laid out the duck, the cabbage, the cucumber – your basic parts of the aforementioned snack – on the coffee table. Then he left. For days. Our cats took to snacking from these spring roll building blocks and maggots began to erupt from the duck. Slug trails appeared. Thinking, surely, he’ll never eat this stuff, I let it sit out so it could metabolise into something more energetic. I wasn't about to start cleaning for his sake.

I came home from the pub one night to find my housemate eating freshly deep-fryed duck spring rolls. This was when his burp (the vurp? The bomit?) happened.

Not the type to fry my meals, I opened my deep fat fryer many years later. It was full of congealed duck spring roll remains.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 17:03, Reply)

The student house
I’m currently back at uni reading law, and while here (even though I am sort of married and have a child, but that’s for another time) I share with 4 guys, all semi mature students. Now you would think that being older than your average student would give them some idea of how to look after the house. Boy was I wrong to think this. The kitchen has not been cleaned in a year, and the cooker is practically alive, and is now one of the lads. The bathroom floor has seen more piss than a German porn starlet. My god how do I live like this? You know what they say: Can’t beat them......
Hit them with a half brick.

Oh *POP*
(AmootPoint My bro is cyril sneer, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 17:02, Reply)

Death by pan
At uni I did the typical thing of sharing a run down terrace in Leeds with 4 others. As you can imagine, there was very little in the way of cleaning done, but occasionally I'd pull my finger out and do the washing up. Right in the corner underneath all the crockery there was a saucepan that had been there a good couple of weeks. I think it had been used for mashed potato but now only had a green fungus inside it.

Just as I was looking at this Kofi walks into the kitchen. I shoved the saucepan in his face to show him the rankness within. He screams and immediately runs out the kitchen. I thought this was quite a funny reaction so proceeded to chase him with the pan, giggling like a loon.

Kofi runs to the bathroom and tries to lock himself in, but I get my foot in the door and he can't quite shut it. I'm laughing my tits off at this point* as he's shouting 'no, NO!'. I mean - what's the fuss about?

Later turns out he has an allergy to penicillin - it tends to put him in a coma... Oooops.


* I might have been stoned, which always makes anything funnier.
( DeadEyeDick, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 16:26, Reply)

It's the excuses that are brilliant.
Weevils in the flour: "Extra protein!"
Dirty crockery: "Well, you eat a peck of dirt before you die..."
No clean laundry: "Think of all the poor kiddies who have extra water because we didn't waste it on our clothes!"
Insects in the bathroom: "I see that spider in the bathroom more than I see you!"

My advice to anyone who has a clean freak in their house? Catch a spider and put it under a cup in an obvious place. When they pick it up it will run out and scare the crap out of them. Also, if the cup has had cola in it it will run in circles, and if it had coffee it will run a lot faster.
(Sivvus trolley collision in the fruit aisle led to a jam, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 16:01, 2 replies)

Right now my house is fairly clean,
during my second year at university in Southampton, however, I lived in a house which even other students found unbearably disgusting. It had:

* Crumbling walls which broke at the touch, leading to piles of plaster on the floor, never cleaned.
* An infestation of slugs which left trails around the carpets every night. If you lives in the downstairs bedrooms you had to watch your feet when getting out of bed to avoid stepping on one
* A shower which began with mild mildew but which, by the end of the year, had clusters of actual mushrooms growing out of the walls
* An upstairs toilet with a hole in the bowl. Every time it was flushed it would drip through the floor and into the bedroom below.
* A kitchen floor which, following the breaking of the washing machine and flooding of the floor, had been covered in thick layers of rotting newspapers, which were never removed.
* A kitchen bin overflowing to the point where it took up a good section of the room and turned out to have a sizeable colony of maggots behind it.
* Around a hundred pizza boxes in stacks around the living room floor. Three of the people in the house worked for Domino's and brought back free pizza every night.
* Stacks of newspapers everywhere, like you see in the documentaries about old people dying in houses full of junk. This one was pretty much my fault. Sorry.
* Piles of unwashed plates everywhere. Each housemate had brought a full set and nobody was going to wash any while there were clean ones around.
* Stains and fragments of broken glass all around the walls from the night when one housemate (who later turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic) and his friend (who is now a semi-famous rockstar) decided to smash bottles of wine against the walls
* And I could continue, but you get the drift.

At the end of the year we laughably attempted to get back our deposits. The landlord replied with a letter in which he described the house as being "beyond all human expectation".
It's just lucky for him that he didn't rent to my friends down the road - they lived for a couple of years on soapbar hash, porridge oats with water, GHB and pints of white russian, and used one old towel to wipe their hands, clean their bodies and dry their dishes. One of them managed to get TB and nearly died. It wasn't really funny, but a lesson was learnt.
( Zuowan, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 15:43, 4 replies)

Shame of the neighbourhood
Some mates (and now ex-colleagues) of mine all share a house, 4 in all, all blokes, all mid twenties, most fairly lazy.

Not long after moving in the arms race for them cleaning anything up was still in progress, so the place itself was fairly manky. This resulted in one member of the house acquiring food poisoning (he claims) simply by touching the kitchen work surfaces.

It has also resulted in a complete stranger, passing on the street and casually looking in their kitchen window, to report them to the local council, prompting a warning letter from said council. The guys in the house took particular offense to this, because as well as being cheeky as fuck, the arms race to clean the house had actually been won and they'd started cleaning long before the good samaritan passed by.
(ShiftyBastard won the World Cup on World Soccer Champs 2010!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 15:17, 1 reply)

A friend Joe and his girlfriend
once moved into a council house in one of the more vibrant parts of the city. It came with quite a large, yet not the most salubrious garden which looked like it had been neglected for a long long time. The sort of morass where you joke about Japanese soldiers living in there who don't know the war is over. Because they were busy making the inside of the house habitable, the garden was relegated to the bottom of the to-do list.

One day they received a letter from the council telling them to get the garden sorted pronto as it was making the area look bad. Which is a bit like saying Peter Sutcliffe makes the inmates of Broadmoor look bad. Apart from opening the back door when they first got the keys, they hadn't ventured out there at all.

About a week after the letter arrived, they were woken early one morning by a knock at the back door. Joe went downstairs, opened up and was greeted by some scruffy bloke.

Joe: "Yeah?"
Scruff: "Just letting you know that I'm moving back in with me mam."
Joe: "What's that got to do with me?"
Scruff: "I just wanted to say thanks for letting me stay for a while."
Joe (perplexed): "I don't know what you're on about."
Scruff: "I'm just saying thanks for not kicking me out from me box. I'll take it wi' me and sling it in me mam's wheelie-bin if you want"
Joe: "Er.." and then it dawned on him. At the back of the garden was a large cardboard box, the sort that a fridge comes in, which had been there since they moved in. This scruffy, yet oddly polite and seemingly grateful vagrant had been living in there for who knows how long and had assumed that my friend knew and let him stay.

The scruffbag cleared off, taking the box with him. After Joe related the story to his girlfriend, she dragged him out there and they spent 3 days clearing everything out, chopping down the weeds and grass and getting a cheap temporary fence up.

So, if your housemates are excessively untidy and never wash up, clean the cooker etc, get a down-and-out to live in the cupboard under the sink.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 15:06, 4 replies)

From September until December of 1998 I lived in a student flat with three other men.
Whilst I could just let you use your imaginations, I will elaborate. The truth may even be more disgusting than what your terrifying brains can conjure. But I'm willing to be proved wrong :-)

Our story revolves around two pints of milk in a plastic container thingy (what are they called anyway? They're not cartons. Cartons are made of cardboard) which quite literally sat in our kitchen, unclaimed, from September to late November. Our kitchen was, as you might expect, fucking disgusting. There were four of us, so it took about a week to get to the point where if you wanted to cook, or eat off a plate instead of out of takeaway wrappings (rare), or drink beer from a glass instead of from the can (Guinness nights only), you HAD to wash up. But none of us ever washed up more than what we needed right there and then. So two pints of milk just blended into the general carnage until it visibly solidified under the plastic.

I never knew milk could turn black.

A bit of background. Being a boys' flat we were not big on originality. We played Tekken 3, a lot, watched films, drank beer and wound each other up. This last point is especially pertinent to the story. When first I moved in I drove up from Nottingham with a carful of stuff, none of which I still own since I came to discover DVD players/a modicum of fashion sense/a more attractive woman than my then-girlfriend. The others had already moved in and informed me in advance that they would be in the pub when I arrived. Steve said he'd leave a key inside the bathroom window, so I just needed to pop round the back and reach through, then let myself in.

Steve failed to mention the full condom he would enclose the key in for "security" purposes.

The bathroom window was one of those frosted affairs so I was reaching in blind. Imagine the horror. I was expecting something hard and metallic; instead my fingers found a prophylactic filled with a suspicious cloudy white liquid. Try to guess how it feels to work out what you're holding as you drag it back through the window.

So I did what I'm confident any one of you would have done; I let myself into the flat, washed my hands incredibly thoroughly, was a bit sick, unpacked the car, marched over to the pub, bought a pint, downed it, bought another pint and walked into the bar where my flatmates were playing pool, loudly referring to Steve as a disgusting cunt. After they'd finished laughing, by which time I needed another pint, Steve assured me that the worrying substance my key had been swimming in was garlic sauce.

"Don't believe me? Smell your fingers"

Nice. My revenge was a long time coming - not because I believed it was a dish best served cold or anything (spaff is usually quite warm in my experience) but because creativity abandoned me in my stereotypically bombed student mindset. Until I asked, for the hundreth time, whose fucking milk was turning black in the fucking kitchen you disgusting fuckers. And then I had an idea.

Many of you will have worked out where I'm going with this. Bear with me, it was fucking funny.

Steve was, and still is to my knowledge, I don't know, I haven't seen him in years, look him up on Facebook if you really want to know, cyber-stalking is so easy these days, seeing a lovely girl called Donna. We all liked her, and I almost feel sorry for how much she had to suffer as part of my hideous prank. I timed it for when they had a weekend away at her parents'. I took a bowl from the kitchen - picked one which had curry smears around the rim for extra "eeewww, fuuuuckk" factor - and decanted as much of the substance formerly known as milk into it. This remains one of the most hideous experiences of my life. The stench of three-month-old milk is ungodly. It rates somewhere between "Rancor" and "Gillian McKeith" on my patented disgustingness scale.

I then placed this bowl under Steve's bed.

Alongside a box of tissues...

...and a borrowed (honest) copy of "Red Hot 60+" magazine.

I then closed the doors and windows of Steve's room and forgot all about it until the Sunday night, when Steve and Donna returned to our flat for a night of "oh thank god we're out from under the parents' watchful gaze let's have lots of sex" sex.

Myself and the other lads were watching TV in the front room until we heard a frankly inhuman noise coming from Steve's room next door. I muted the TV and sit upright in alert, gleeful anticipation. With hindsight, this may have identified me as the culprit. After a series of half-choked exclamations were crescendo'd with a very, very loud "WHAT THE HOLY FUCK?!!", Steve stormed into the next room demanding to know who had sucked the air out of his room and replaced it with camembert in a gaseous state.

I wish I could tell you I said something witty about garlic sauce, or smelling his fingers, but I was laughing so hard that witty repartee was even further from my grasp than normal. Again, not helping any claims I may have laid to innocence. Steve was proper angry. Apparently the stench and the discovery that her boyfriend was rubbing one out over grannies then keeping the produce of said self-flagellation in a bowl under his bed for long enough for it to turn black and solidify like some hideous splunge Star Trek villain (think of the episode where Tasha Yar dies) was a right turn-off for Donna.

I calmed down long enough to assure him that I'd planned for this eventuality and he could keep the mag for as long as was necessary.

And then he hit me.

Totally worth it.

Length... three months, in a warm kitchen, before it was unleashed into a hot room. Think about it. SO proud of myself.
(Darth Foxtrot A one-man army dedicated to making fetch happen, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 14:59, 11 replies)

THE FAIRY LIQUID FIXATED VOLATILE CLEANING GIMP OF MANCHESTER UNI
Like most people who toodle off to university, I spent my first year learning an awful lot about sex, beer and drugs while managing to survive on a diet which consisted almost exclusively of cinnamon flavored pop tarts, Big Macs, and those little lollies you get in chemists that double up as whistles before you lick the innards out and are left with a gooey, sugary stump. (There may have been some lectures thrown in there too somewhere down the line but I’m fucked if I can remember any of that twattery, it was a long time ago).

A mate of a mate was a lad named Ed. A big burly public schoolboy type who was, officially, the most stupid person in the entire fucking world. Decent enough bloke, but thicker than quick setting concrete. Now Ed had a hobby. Drugs. He loved um. Anything he could lay his eager beefy hands on he’d smoke, snort, drink, or quite possible shove up his arse.

And Ed’s particular favorite extra-curricular laboratory-made tipple was that rough-as-fuck, cock-shrinking-motor mouth-enducing shit, speed. If there was a whiff of amphetamine sulphate in the air, Ed would go bounding over like a great big mental puppy and buy up as much of the finest stay-awake powder his parents money could buy. After Ed had snorted enough speed to kill a Shetland pony, he’d hang round and generally be a complete pain in the arse. But then one night he came back to our gaff, whizzing his tits off, went into the kitchen, found a sponge under the sink and started washing the kitchen floor furiously. When he’d finished and we discovered our kitchen floor was actually blue, not grey, Ed started on the washing up. Our bottle of washing up liquid – which we’d bought back in September – was finally getting some use now we were nearing Spring.

Then Ed moved into the living room, the place we’d usually end up playing drunken cups-and-saucers cricket. His massive hands deftly picking the broken crockery out of the shag pile. “This is fucking excellent!” said one of my housemates. And it was. From then on whenever Ed decided to get off his face, we’d always try and engineer it so he ended up back at our place so he could clean up after us.

It was like having our very own six-feet-four, twenty-stone cleaning fair… on drugs.

I was telling one of Ed’s housemates about this cleaning-coup of ours and this lad, Ed’s housemate said cautiously: “I wouldn’t do that in future.” I thought this lad was getting pissy about losing out on his cleaning gimp privilages. But no. He continued: “We did that too – but we had a bad experience and, well, whenever Ed comes back off his tits and goes for a mop or a bucket or fuck knows what,” and this lad leveled his gaze at me and said earnestly. “well, we just pile on and beat the shit out of him before it goes too far. It’s a fucking effort. He’s a big bastard and it usually takes four or five of us to bring him down.”

I laughed it off. This lad was a bit of a joker. He was just… having… a joke…

Was about a month before Ed turned up at our place next, three-thirty in the morning, off his tits on fuck knows what. He marched into the kitchen, we heard him clattering about for a mop and broom – all normal so far. Leave him to it. He’s happy. No problem there.

Only this time Ed marched back into the living room where we sat round listening to Sabbath, Ed was clutching the mop, this weird adgitated, intense look on his face, teeth clenched. This man-mountain of dense inbred upper-middle-classness rocked slowly backward and forward.

“You ok, Ed?” I asked.

- Pause –

“WHICH OF YOU FUCKERS USED MY FUCKING FAIRY LIQUID!!! I’M GONNA KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU FUCKING CUNTS!!! CUU-UUU-UUU-NNN-NNN-TTT-TTT-SSSS!!!”

And with that he slammed the mop down hard on the lad closest to him, my mate Ian, and knocked him out cold. The rest of us – being proper manly heroic types – made a mad dash for the door and the relative safety of the cold Manchester night air outside where we hid in the bushes, our breath billowing out as steam from the effort of moving so quickly without actually shitting ourselves.

Ed, if you’re out there now and you happen to be reading this. I want to make a confession. It was Ian. He used your Fairy Liquid. I know where he lives, if you want his address and feel like going round and hitting him again???
( SpankyHanky, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 14:54, Reply)

Are women generally tidier than blokes?
If that sounds sexist, well, it wasn't meant to, I just wondered. They are meant to be, but my ex was disgusting; mucky knickers and hankies carpeted the floor, and I was the only one ever to clean the kitchen.
(Bear Pookie The Frankly Challenged. Halloween is coming to town., Fri 26 Mar 2010, 14:40, 7 replies)

Wall Bread
I used to live in Middlesbrough. Naturally, our house was a total shithole, and the envy of the street.

In the aftermath of a fairly minor food-fight in the living room one evening, I flung a piece of crust at my mate. Being a corner, its trajectory was not what I had anticipated, and it fell in a lame arc. Feeling despondent, I went to go and retrieve it, and that's when I saw something magical. The bread had never reached the ground, instead, it was held, suspended 2 feet off the floor by some errant cobwebs adjacent to the wall.

Of course, we all found this to be absolutely fucking marvellous, and it was forbidden to move wall bread under any circumstances.

It stayed in place until we left the following year.
( SigmaX0 Dear Die Hard. You rock!, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 14:36, 4 replies)

Washing up
Before I finally got a "proper job" and was able to buy my own place, I shared a house in Wakefield with four other blokes, all of whom, despite being 25 or so, didn't seem capable of wiping their own arses without their mothers around. I was the only person who cleaned, washed up, put things away etc., and on occasions would go on strike to see if it would shame the others into lifting a finger (it never did).

One evening during such a period of industrial action, a housemate came home from work, poured himself a bowl of Sugar Puffs, added the milk then looked for a spoon. On discovering that they were all in the sink, he shouted "you dirty fucking bastards!", tipped the contents of the bowl into the bin and flounced off.
(Vice Admiral Sir Charles Cockbrush KCB MBE DSO, who is finding it increasingly difficult to log into b3ta.com wants to duck your aunt and kick your puppy, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 14:27, Reply)

Cup of tea anyone?
A friend of mine had a typically grimy student house. The kitchen always had a pile of old washing up in and around the sink. He once made a cup of tea for his housemate who drank most of it and probably quite enjoyed it, up to the point where he found an inch thick layer of partially dissovled mould at the bottom. He was sick for over a week afterwards.
(Paolo, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 14:01, 1 reply)

2nd year of university we had a particular bad house. We let the kitchen get into such states that whenever we did clean, it took four of us over three hours. After a while we got a housemates girlfriend roped in too, as she was nearly living there. I recall oven trays and frying pans with inches of hardened grease on them. One of our more legendary housemates sometimes just used to reheat the pan and reuse that grease.
We also developed a really bad problem of never getting up on time to put our rubbish out for collection so we started throwing the bags into the empty shed in our garden. By February it had filled up and we just left it too its rotting. Come the end of the year we thought we had better empty it out or we might lose our deposits(we lost them anyway). Ill never forget that putrid vile stench when we opened the door. There were alot of maggots and also a rat that looked very well fed.
A year or so after this the house featured on a program showcasing the worst student houses in the UK. I can really see it. Despite our filthiness the place had a big damp problem making one guy really sick. No heating despite repeated attempts to get the boiler fixed and the backdoor was wedged into place. If you pushed it fell out.

The only place Ive ever lived more filthy than that was the All Nations Backpackers in Melbourne. The bedbugs were that big we gave em names.
(reesy22, Fri 26 Mar 2010, 13:33, Reply)