Seeking advice on housemate situation

chocolateypie

Went downstairs this morning to get some food out from my freezer, only to discover that it had been unplugged for god knows how long (as I've not really been around for the past few days and the last time I took something out of the freezer was sometime last week), as a result all the food I've kept in there has been completely defrosted :mad: . I live in a student house where we're always short of freezer room so I bought my own and kept all my food in there; the housemates have no rights whatsoever to be fiddling around with it.

This isn't the first problem I've had in this house either. I have had one of them breaking off and taking the antenna of my wireless router for reasons unknown :mad: , although it was apparently that she couldn't get her wireless internet to work. She has since given it back but I'm not sure if this would have had any lasting effect on the router e.g. poorer signals than before. Again none of them has the right to be messing around with my stuff, especially in the case of the router, as I was generous enough to allow them to use it while I accessed the internet using my phone as a modem. Hence saving them having to shell out £60 or so for a similar one.

I'm also wondering what the legal rights of students sharing a house are? Are the individual rooms treated as separate property? If we wanted to have a TV in each one of our rooms, we would have to pay for individual TV licences as apparently it does not cover shared accommodation where each room has a lock. I have had one of the housemates coming into my room while I was away at work to "have a look at" the electrical items I had so she could work out the amount I need to pay towards electricity, but won't asking me be a lot easier? Or even asking to be let in. Admittedly this wouldn't have happened if I had locked my room, but I wasn't expecting any of them to be such complete sh*ts.

Is there anything I can do in this situation? I can't exactly move out as the housing contract ends in June, and my current location is quite close to uni. Will I be able to file any sort of complaint against them? I don't want to take any legal actions unless I have to (although I'm not sure if I can in this case), but it would be one way to tell them to F*** OFF.

Any advice greatly appreciated

melancholly

sounds like a nightmare....you get lots of oddballs in shared houses - someone came in to my room once to borrow my hair straigheners (in a closed box behind something else under the bed - so they had a good rummage around through my stuff) and i had to put a password on my computer because some came in and adjusted the settings!

so you're not the only one.... doesn't help but misery does love company!

i would move everything that's yours into your bedroom and keep it locked. it's going to be very difficult to do anything else or you could make your living situation very awkward until you leave. i'd try talking to them and saying that you feel like your personal space is being invaded and try that approach first. Then with everything locked in your room there's very little they can do if it gets ugly. but avoid confrontation if you can - you don't want to end up hating being in your house in case you bump into anyone (been there, done that - was horrible!)

DKLS

My friends one treat at Uni was Luxury home made muesli, nuts seeds, fruit the works, and one oik kept nabbing it, so she made a special batch laced with laxatives!!! Didnt happen again, not helpful in your situation, but always a thought for a solution to stolen food.

chocolateypie

Thanks for the sympathy, but there's no point in talking to any of them, because we just don't talk. To be honest 2 of them aren't that bad, but that's only when compared to the other one who made my wireless router non-wireless (the same little sh*t - I'll refer to her as this as she's little and a total sh*t - who came into my room uninvited). The 2 lesser of 3 evils you might say

I already hate living in this house and try to spend as much time away from it as possible, which usually involves going somewhere else overnight, which has in turn affected my studies as I just didn't feel like coming back to a crap environment.

I lock my door every single time I go anywhere, even if it's just across the road to pick up a takeaway. I lock my laptop when I go to the toilet - it's not as if any of them are remotely computer literate but better safe than sorry. Just an example of how knowledgeable little sh*t is, she asked if I was "stealing her internet with that big white box in my room". That "big white box" would be my Xbox 360...

chocolateypie

DKLS wrote:

My friends one treat at Uni was Luxury home made muesli, nuts seeds, fruit the works, and one oik kept nabbing it, so she made a special batch laced with laxatives!!! Didnt happen again, not helpful in your situation, but always a thought for a solution to stolen food.

Hmm I guess I could always accidentally drop some laxatives food they keep in the fridge if things like this keep happening...I'll keep this in mind

holstar

you need to check your contract...this will say whether the house is let as a house (as a whole) to the 4 of you, or whether it is let to you personally as a room and use of shared areas. If its the first one, the tv license applies to entire house, if its let as seperate rooms you need seperate licences.

as for splitting bills in terms of what appliances you each have in your room (why she went into your room) then thats going to get sooo complicated! ok, you might use more leccy than her, but does she use more water? what about gas? etc....splitting it equally 4 ways is probably the best way.

with regards to your rights as a tenant, I'm not sure...ask at your union advice centre, they usually have people who deal with accommodation issues. Might also be worth asking at the university accommodation office (as well as the union one), see if they can help.
You say the housing contract ends in June, but there is usually a way to get out of it, with say, a months notice. Union or university accomodation might be able to help you with finding somewhere else to live if you don't feel you can make it work for the next few months.

HTH, and hope you can sort this out somehow

Snow_Angel

I'm thinking they feel that you're using too much electricity? You have a separate freezer .... I might be a bit !!!!ed off that you were using extra resources. Did you ask your housemates before you put your own frezer in? I know you say you don't all talk, but maybe you could ask to speak to them all together and find out what all of you think (hopefully in a rational manner!). Worth a try I would have thought if you are really unhappy enough for it to be affecting your studies and you being able to stay in your own house. But let them know you are extremely !!!!ed off about their invasion of your privacy - that is just totally unacceptable. And lock your room in future!

lau_dicker

Just wondered how you ended up living with people you dont get on with?

ames123_2

Firstly always lock your room! I always lock mine.

Bill cause arguements and like someone mentioned you have your own freezer using more electric. However this person should not have gone into your room. I do think it is just simpler to split the bills so many ways. We have problems with that here because some people are not here all the time and some have electric heaters so people are using less and some more.
Do you have problems with the cleanliness of the house? Just asking out of interest, but we do!
I know what you mean about not talking, theres 7 of us here and we don't really talk and we're not all in at the same time so it's hard to arrange a house meeting.
I think just lock your door, try and talk to them and stick it out until June. It's not that long away when you think that you've got the Easter hols when you can probably go home.
Good luck! x

Blacksheep1979

holstar wrote:

you need to check your contract...this will say whether the house is let as a house (as a whole) to the 4 of you, or whether it is let to you personally as a room and use of shared areas. If its the first one, the tv license applies to entire house, if its let as seperate rooms you need seperate licences.

actually its more just down to if you have locks on your bedroom doors and TV's in your bedroom. If there are no locks, then no need for everyone to have a license (only the one communal one) but if there are locks on each bedroom then you will be deemed as renting seperately and need a license each. If you have one license for the whole house the TV license company aren't going to come enquiring about if you need one each though :cool:

chocolateypie

The freezer I have is quoted to have an annual energy usage of about £20, so I pay £5 extra towards the electricity bill per quarter anyway. Like I said if she wanted to know what other electrical equipment I had she could've just asked. I only have a laptop which doesn't use as much as a PC anyway, plus a printer which is only switched on every so often. Oh and some phone charges if those are considered significant. I use less gas than the rest of them - either make my own sandwiches or pot noodles and the likes, but I don't go around recording the number of hours per day they spend cooking in the kitchen :mad:

The point I was trying to make about TV licence is that if our rooms were deemed as separate property, then surely invading someone's room without prior consent would be an offence of some sort?

As for how I ended up living with people I don't like...long story short I got unlucky, they were alright at the time until I had to spend pretty much the entire summer with that little sh*t constantly getting on my nerves

And yes, definitely lesson learnt - I lock my door all the time now