I moved into my current apartment in September. I live with 2 roommates, I'll call them M and A, M is a male and A is a female (I'm male). A and I have not seen eye to eye on many things since I first moved in. We got into a small argument the first week that I moved in and she expressed the opinion that because she and M lived here before me, the apartment is "their home" and I basically just live here. I've tried to explain that we all signed the same lease, and that we are all co-tenants, which legally entitles me to an equal share of the apartment, but she claims that it's "our home in a different way than it is your home, and you need to respect that".
After a rocky start when I first moved in, things have been mostly calm. I'm pretty easy-going, and in an effort to placate A, I've made a lot of accommodations to try to make my footprint here as small as possible. They refuse to use the dishwasher because they believe it conserves water to wash dishes by hand (with the faucet running), which I've agreed to do. They do not use the furnace, and this is something I'll be returning to because it's the source of my most recent conflict with A. Additionally, I have less cupboard space in the kitchen than either A or M, I have only one shelf of the refrigerator while they get the rest of it, I have no space in any of the shared closets, I spend virtually no time in the common areas (I've not used their TV once since I moved in), and because A has 2 cats, she keeps her bedroom door open 24/7, so I also make an extreme effort to be as quiet as possible because our rooms share a wall. On top of this, the common areas and kitchen are filled with M and A's possessions, and they use the kitchen table as additional counter space (which I do not get to use) and to feed the cats which means that I would have to wash the table to eat on it. Writing this all out makes it seem like a large list, but on the whole I was pretty happy with our dynamic as I'm fine spending my time in my room while I'm home.
Two days ago I approached A with a problem I was having. Since I returned to the apartment following my winter break from school, I've noticed that A leaves our front door open whenever she leaves the house so that her cats have some entertainment while she's away. She even bought bird seed which she lays out in front of the door to attract birds to keep the cats happy. Just to clarify, we have a "screen" door which is like a metal grate, so safety isn't a concern. My problem is that it is the middle of January, and I'm constantly cold while I'm home because of the door being left open. When I approached A about closing the door more often, we came to a compromise. I'm pretty careful with my words, and I remember agreeing to leave the door open until 4p.m., unless I was too cold or if the weather required that it be closed. She thinks that the agreement was unequivocally 4 p.m., and yesterday at around 12p.m. I closed our front door because I was feeling cold after it was left open at 9:30am. At around 7pm A came home and knocked on my door, she began yelling at me about breaking the agreement we had, and in the process of her temper tantrum she called me entitled, rude and said that I was acting like a brat who wants things his way all the time. I was pretty astounded by what I was hearing, and I tried to say that she did not have a right to be talking to me like that, but she rolled her eyes, scoffed and interrupted me when I tried to speak to her. She likes to claim that I refuse to see things from her point of view, but when I said that she hasn't even begun to try to listen to what I have to say (because she interrupts me) she said something along the lines of, "I thought you said a lot of sentences". I stayed calm the whole time, and after her tirade she said, "I don't even have the energy to deal with this right now because I have 2 papers to write" and she left to go write her papers. A couple minutes later I knocked on her door and calmly asked if we could find some time over the weekend to sit down and talk this through, and again she rolled her eyes and said, "I don't even know when I'll have the energy to deal with this" and so I left her alone, and went to spend the night at my girlfriend's house.
Today, I'm livid. I feel incredibly disrespected by her, and I can't believe she had the audacity to call me a brat while she was standing in my room, raising her voice and calling me names. She reiterated her opinion that this is her home not mine, and when I tried to explain that I closed the door because it was exceptionally cold, she scoffed and rolled her eyes. When I pointed out that she misunderstood or misheard our agreement, she scoffed and rolled her eyes. This isn't the first time she's gotten angry at me after mishearing or misinterpreting something I've said, and it's so frustrating because she talks over me and then acts like I'm the one who refuses to meet her halfway. I tried to suggest that we write down an agreement to avoid any ambiguity, and again she just scoffed. When I went to ask her if we could find a time to talk, she criticized me for being antagonistic because I can "explain things very calmly, and not everyone can do that".
Well I looked up the weather over the last month in our city, and it turns out that the night before I closed the door was not only the coldest night we've had (37 degrees fahrenheit in southern california) since I came back from my break, it was the coldest night we've had during the entire month of January. Another concern that I tried to raise is that every morning there's condensation covering the interior of our windows, and when I get up the interior of my coffee cup is wet to the touch. Since I'm equally liable for this apartment, I'm worried that we will develop mold or other internal problems from the excessive moisture, and again when I raised this concern she literally just scoffed and said "that's not going to happen". When I brought up that she left our door open during a major storm, she actually looked at me and said "I didn't know it was going to rain, I can't predict the weather". We literally got amber alerts warning us about flash floods, and she's pretending that she didn't know we were in the middle of a storm?
Where do I go from here? I printed out the weather data, our lease, a list of my rights as a co-tenant, and a couple internet articles that explain the risk of mold from excessive moisture in the house. I would really like to take the gloves off and explain to her that she has no right to bully me around, and that I have no obligation to make any more accommodations to her. But I'm not hopeful that fighting fire with fire is going to work out in my favor. Any advice would be appreciated because A is making me miserable.
TL;DR - Roommate flipped her shit because I closed the front door when I was cold.
Submitted January 27, 2017 at 07:25AM by I_Am_Treebeard http://ift.tt/2jkG2Oh badroommates
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