This is a variant of an old thread where one roommate wanted a light on all night (not a small nightlight but a big light) and expected the other to just deal; likewise, the person who demanded absolute darkness in a room, not even the light from an alarm clock, who expected the other person to just deal.
The window washing is ridiculous but I don’t think it’s u reasonable to throw a comforter over ones bed and keep trash off the floor. And it’s unreasonable to wipe down a sink. Time for the slob to grow up; that’s part of sharing common space.
Dusty – You sent your kid to college to learn. Sounds like this is a lesson in “how to get along with difficult others” and “you get what you negotiate.”
If you intervene your kid won’t learn anything. Time to land the helicopter.
I don’t think the roommate “can’t stand anything out of place.” My kid’s best friend couldn’t stand it. The roommate in this case is asking OP’s daughter to have her bed made and vacuum the room once a week. I do agree window cleaning is a bit over the top.
I do think it is unnatural for complete strangers in having to share a room for a whole year. There is no time in life when one would really need to do that, so I am not sure what we are trying to teach our kid by forcing them to share a room with a stranger. I opted to have my kids to have a single freshman year, and choose their apartment mates after the first year.
I do not like to share a room with people, but if/when I have to I always make sure my bed is made and I was as tidy as possible, because I know being tidy wouldn’t bother people, but being messy would.
And I agree that “deep cleaning” likely is a regional construct. I grew up in New England- deep cleaning was done once or possibly twice a year and involved rolling up the rugs, hosing off the window screens, removing the shelves of the refrigerator and scrubbing it down with bleach, etc.
When I moved to the midwest and hired a cleaning service, I was warned that if they only came once a week they’d just have time for a “light cleaning” and not a “deep cleaning”… which turned out to be perfectly fine. It meant cleaning the bathroom, dusting and vacuuming, wiping down the counters, scrubbing the sink, floors, and cooking surfaces in the kitchen. NOT just tidying up which is what I’d feared!
I would agree to making the bed. It’s actually a good habit to get into and takes two minutes, tops. 1, or less, if she just pulls the covers up over her pillow and straightens it out a bit…
I’d also agree to the vacuuming and sink cleaning - that’s reasonable, and it won’t take long at all.
The deep window cleaning? Weekly? That’s bordering on obsessive, and I think it’s fair to negotiate on that one… maybe once a semester.
I agree with the above comment that once a neat freak and a slob agree to disagree, the slob always wins.
Not saying the OP’s D is a slob - just saying it wouldn’t be a bad thing for her to agree to the easy, fast stuff like bed making and weekly sink cleaning and vacuuming.
And - why were these two assigned a room together? This frightens me, for my own D’s sake - I thought they had kids fill out questionnaires so they could match up the neat and sloppy and the in-between…
The OP mentioned “straightening everything every day.” It’s not clear exactly what that means. But I think that a few days’ worth of clutter in the other person’s space is generally something that you just need to deal with.
Clutter in common areas, that’s different. But I do not, for example, tidy my desk every day. Never have. If that’s the sort of thing the roommate is expecting, that’s unreasonable. If she means that the shared sink should be tidy, and stuff picked up off the floor, that’s different.
Back when I was in college, one of the neighbor dorm rooms had a messy roommate and a not-messy one. If their door was open, one could see half of the room messy and the other half not-messy, divided down the middle (no food leftovers or the like, though). It was two guys, though.
if this was my D , I would stay out of it. this what RAs are for- people do change roomates.if this was me I would tell her there is an invisible line- don’t cross it. if you want to clean the sink, windows , cabinet that is your business,not mine.
Don’t most school let you check out a vacuum at the front desk of the dorm? My son’s school even exchanges your sheets every Tuesday if you bring your old ones to the front desk.
This little bit of cleaning she is asking for will take such a small amount of time and probably benefit your daughter in the long run. I had a neat freak roommate in college and it was good for me…taught me a lot about keeping a place clean. I can still stop by my roommate’s house unannounced and it looks likes she’s about to have an open house. Not a thing out of place or a weed in the yard.
My poor D2 just went back to school after 3 weeks at our house, which is currently on the market. She would find this roommate easy to live with after this 3 weeks with me keeping after her so the house could be ready to show any time we left it.
It’s my goal to be neat but I don’t like people who are demanding, telling me what to do, I think of them as being inconsiderate. What’s next? Tell me to change my underwear once a day. It’s my business, really.
Alarm or light is different. Sloppy is not the same as dirty, like leaving food around, which could attract animals and insects. But if I don’t feel like making my bed, why does it bother other people. These OCD people need to know that there are people who are not OCD. Both of my husband’s mother and my own mother were neat freaks. Maybe they would have been happier if they were not so tidy.
