https://www.boards.ie/ Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:08:29 +0000 en share accommodation — boards.ie - Now Ye're Talkin' https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2057893943/roommate-problems-in-shared-apartment Sat, 21 Jul 2018 20:17:37 +0000 Accommodation & Property greencurry2018 2057893943@/discussions
I moved into a shared apartment very recently.
The apartment is being rented out by an agency, and one person in the apartment (who I'll name Emma), handles the payment of rent/bills each month. Emma added the listing for the shared room on daft.ie, and accepted me into the room after I did a viewing of the apartment and agreed to some rules relating to a cleaning roster that everyone in the apartment would follow.

There are 6 people in the apartment (3 male, 3 female), and three rooms:
- a double room - Emma stays in this room.
- a twin room (two single beds).
- a room with three single beds - I stay in this room.

I found that, compared to other places I've seen in Dublin city, the apartment was nice, and in a great location.

So I moved into the apartment less than a month ago.
Upon moving in, I learned that I was replacing someone else (and apparently that person wasn't leaving on good terms with Emma).
Also I learned there was another roommate moving in (call him James) at the same time as me.

I got chatting to all of the roommates over the first two days, and found they were all very friendly and welcoming. Each of us is from a different country, which makes for interesting conversation and food.

Moving into the apartment came with the agreement that each member would have their own week where they would clean the apartment. This seemed very reasonable to me.

On the second day of moving in, James began his first cleaning session. I heard what sounded like a little bit of agitation from the kitchen as I sat in the sitting room.
Emma then came into the sitting room and told me to follow her to the kitchen where she would give myself and James a full demo of how to clean the apartment. It appeared that James was in the process of doing his first cleaning, and Emma was agitated by the method he was using to clean. She did not seem seriously agitated, but her tone towards James seemed to be a little more direct than I would expect to hear from someone instructing a new arrival how to properly clean.

So Emma started with the kitchen. To summarize the kitchen cleaning demo: the expected cleaning was surprisingly thorough. Apart from what I had expected would be typical for a kitchen cleaning, i.e. cleaning of the floor, dishes, removing rubbish etc., Emma covered almost everything that could be cleaned in the kitchen. What seemed to me a little excessive was that she expected the fridge to be completely cleaned out each week with cleaning liquid. She demonstrated removing all of the items in the fridge, one shelf at a time, thoroughly scrubbing after rinsing each shelf with cleaning liquid. She demonstrated cleaning the counter tops, oven, microwave, windows. Emma appeared to be getting more agitated as she progressed through the demo.

We were next shown how to clean the shared toilet. James said he had finished cleaning this in the previous two hours. Emma pointed to the sink and challenged James that it was not cleaned properly. At this point, James, perhaps feeling belittled, began to offer respectful responses to Emma's increasingly stern challenges. He said it's possible someone used the toilet since he had cleaned it, and suggested that that may have been why there was a hair in the sink. With the attention on the sink, Emma then crouched down and rubbed her finger on the floor behind the sink, and raised her finger out to us both, the finger now covered in a grey dust. She said that the cleaning had not been done correctly.

In the sitting room, Emma began further scrutinizing James recent cleaning. She began to move the couches into the center of the room and point to the dirt that had not been cleaned from under the furniture. She showed us how to dust the fireplace mantel, and walked the perimeter of the room to highlight some of the dust that had been left on the edges of the carpet and the wall skirting. The demo finished with an instruction on how to use the hoover. Emma showed us how to remove and reattach the hoover bin and said, in what sounded like a bitter/challenging tone, 'I want to see the both of you do this after me'. I was relieved to accomplish the task, feeling that I was being tensely watched.

Over the next few days I began reassuring myself that the cleaning thing would work out, that Emma perhaps had good reason to be strict, and that, should my own cleaning efforts turn out not to be satisfactory, I could suggest that we put our money together to get someone to clean the apartment weekly.

James was asked to redo the cleaning and so spent another 2 hours cleaning the apartment the following day. In total he said he had cleaned for about 4 hours. He confided in me that he felt Emma seemed rude, and the amount of cleaning she expected seemed excessive.

Over the next week I learned some more details about the cleaning arrangement.
James and I discovered that Emma, and one of the other roommates, do not partake in the weekly cleaning. Instead they have the duty of managing the recycling bins, and each week walking the rubbish bin out to the recycling center (apparently takes ~40 mins). James said to me that he felt this seemed to be unfair. He felt that we should rotate the cleaning/recycling among everyone. Trying to see from the perspective of Emma and the other housemate, I thought that perhaps the recycling chore may require considerable effort also. It did occur to me that Emma mentioned very little, if any, of this part of the arrangement until after the cleaning demo.

I continued to get along very well with all the housemates, including Emma. Though Emma is ~15 years older than James and myself (both of us being mid 20s), we share similar tastes in music and food, so we all seem to bond well in the evening times when we sometimes play music and share dinner. So most of the time things feel grand.

However, I observed over time that Emma has a tendency to give orders to the other housemates. Often in an aggressive/condescending tone, with a habit of throwing in a curse word. She challenges James about small things, such as leaving the light on in the kitchen.
On that issue, James left on the light because he had thought the other housemates may still be using the kitchen, that was reasonable given that it was only about 9pm and there were 5 of us in the apartment at that point. By this point James had become too familiar with challenges and having to explain himself.

I now feel that Emma is perhaps deliberately intimidating the other housemates, and that they don't really seem to challenge her or defend themselves, even when it would seem reasonable for them to do so. I think this may be because they each happen to be in difficult life situations, all of them seem not to be in their desired line of work, and don't seem to be financially secure; which I suspect may be partly why they fear getting on the wrong side of Emma. It seems Emma has made it known to everyone that she has kicked out previous housemates because they weren't cleaning properly.

So my cleaning week hasn't come around yet, and I anticipate it may not go so smootly.
I talked with James about the idea of us getting a cleaner and he said that he was thinking of the same thing after the cleaning demo that Emma had given. I talked with Emma and she said that she doesn't want a cleaner because she can't trust anyone else coming in to the apartment. I feel like if I asked the other 2 housemates that are part of the weekly cleaning roster, they may support getting a cleaner. But I'm doubtful that even having the majority support getting a cleaner would change Emma's position.

Finally, to get to the issue that inspired me to get some advice.
This weekend, James contacted me while I was away from the apartment and said that Emma had challenged him about not properly washing a glass, his defense was that someone else had used the glass, and that's why it wasn't clean. Emma apparently wasn't happy with this. He said she cursed at him and started banging the dishes, and threatened to kick him out of the apartment.

This seems to me to be completely unacceptable. James is an extremely friendly and respectful person, and gets on well with everyone in the apartment, so I'm certain that he didn't deserve to be challenged in such a way over this issue. He said that he doesn't think he can put up with it for much longer, and may move out of the apartment. I said we can talk to her together and try to resolve the problems. We've agreed that if we can't resolve the problems we'll both move out and find our own apartment to share.

Would much appreciate any thoughts/advice on this! Thanks.]]>