I agree with the idea of having a comforter that can be thrown over the bed, regardless if the sheets, etc, are perfect underneath.
I think most colleges have residential questionnaires for matching students, but they can fall short. The very neat roommate might have grown up in a rigid household where she was accused of sloppiness regularly, and so she said that she wasn’t very neat. The other roommate might be neater than her siblings, or answered that she would like a tidy roommate on the hope that it would help her maintain better habits. Of course, some students are slow to respond to the questionnaires, also, and - in the era of social media - might have thought that someone they encountered in an on-line admitted students group sounded ideal.
Back when I attended college, we were all allowed to smoke in our rooms. Some students took up the habit shortly before or after starting college, and had said they weren’t smokers. Others lied about their habits, if parents were looking over their shoulders. This was a very sore subject for some roommates who otherwise seemed perfectly matched.
Did the OP’s D reply to a questionnaire? If she did, and indicated that she was less than fastidious in her housekeeping, she could bring this up with an RA and ask how her roommate had responded. Perhaps the roommate had wanted to sound more casual and accommodating in a survey than she actually is.
One of my jobs as a parent is to make sure my children learn how to clean up after themselves. I would be embarrassed to inflict a slob on a poor roommate who is also paying the equivalent of $600 per month to share a tiny room.
IMO your daughter should have learned to change sheets every week and make her bed before she left home.
I grew up with a cleaning lady and my mom grew up with a cook and a cleaning lady but she thought it was poor manners to make their job more difficult. It takes one second to wipe down a sink with a tissue after you use it.
I want the name of the college someone mentioned where no one ever made their beds. Ug.
S’s school did have specific neatness questions. I think there were 3 options: Do you like things to be picked up right away? Are you OK with some clutter but like things to be tidied eventually? Are you OK with a messy room? (I paraphrase but they are something like that). The boy chose OK with messy room and he is a slob at home. His roomie also chose messy. However, they made their beds and organized things and got their posters straight and negotiated shared space and the boy did laundry AND folded it the first weekend! I think having only 2 towels and one coffee mug will go a long way towards neatness. Pulling your comforter up over your bed as if it were made is not hard to do and wiping out a shared counter and sink with a clorox wipe should be the work of a moment as well.
We purchased paper towels and clorox wipes and tall kitchen trash bags for the room (along with a garbage can) and he texted roomie from Target to say that we were bringing them.
Hmm. At the risk of getting too touchy-feely, if I were your DD, I’d ask the roommate what it “meant” to her to have me do each of these things. Try to find out where she’s coming from.
If a roomie had instructed me with that list and not opened a dialog first, I’d probably would have suggested that I’d straighten my comforter daily, toss any clutter into my bins or shelves daily at night, and take turns doing a deep-clean of the shared sink each weekend. Then I’d suggest we play the rest by ear for at least the first month.
They should probably meet about a full roomie contract (noise, guests, etc.).
@dyiu13 brings up a point. What did the daughter do or say when confronted with this list? I hope the two roommates sat down and went over the list and negotiated what they would do to keep the room acceptable to both roommates. If so, what was the outcome?
I’m not so sure attacking the roommate or the list helps the situation. It just colors the daughter’s view of the roommate (crazy) and herself (it’s okay to be a slob), potentially putting her in an awkward situation (“my mom thinks your list is nuts.”).
I’m glad to see the daughter is trying to resolve out on her own. It’s fine to support one’s child when she is stressed but it’s another to solve her problems for her. They need to try to figure things out themselves. It’s time for the parent to step back.
I could never have been accused of being the neatest person in the country, however…
Dorm rooms are small. If you do not clean it starts to smell bad quickly.When you are forced to share space, anything the roommate can see or smell from their side of the room is definitely their business.
OP, when should they talk about it? After 3 months of living in a pig sty? Roommates should have any of these types of discussions in the first few days.
Really need to discuss what exactly is meant by deep cleaning. There is always room for negotiation. It really sounds like OP did not teach her child to clean or be remotely neat, so it is not surprising that she is appalled by the idea of having to be neat with a roommate.
Best option for OP’s child is to get a single room where she can live in her own mess.
When my son was a senior in college, he shared an apartment with three other guys. Two of them valued neatness. He and the fourth guy did not.
Since neat people find sloppy environments offensive, but sloppy people do not find neat environments offensive, the four guys agreed to maintain a high level of cleanliness in the common areas of the apartment. However, they did as they pleased in their own bedrooms (the apartment had four single bedrooms).
Your daughter is living in an environment where there is no private space, so she has more of a problem than my son did. (On the other hand, she has less square footage to worry about.) But the same principle applies: neat people find sloppy environments offensive, but sloppy people don’t find neat environments offensive.
So I think she’s the one who needs to give in.
I disagree that anything you can see from your side of the room is your business. If something is dirty and smells, absolutely. If you find the clutter on your roommafe’s desk aesthetically unpleasing, I don’t think it’s all that different than not liking the design of her comforter.
I’m kind of messy. I make an effort to be less so when I live with tidier people. My husband is tidier than I am. I’ve become a bit neater over the years living with him. He generally does more tidying than I do because he cares about it more. And he lives with the fact that there’s clutter in my areas. I try to keep it at s lower level for his sake but I haven’t become a neat freak and never will.
@HarvestMoon1 I think the point of a shiny sink is that it leads to a cleaner kitchen when there are no dirty dishes in the sink. Most messys probably wish they were cleaner but perhaps have no clue where to start. Flylady steps in with emails to teach people the simple hows and daily routines to keeping a clean house. If you don’t want to live with CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome) any longer http://www.flylady.net/ is a fabulous place to start.
I do think there’s a difference between clutter on one’s own desk and active dirt and grime. A shared sink and counter space SHOULD be cleaned regularly. That isn’t too much to ask. Garbage should be take out and dishes and food type items taken care of in a relatively timely manner. Not immediately, necessarily, but not left for days to moulder.
How can you see the actual dirt when there is clutter covering it.
I mean really…how many of us here clear away the clutter so a cleaning person can clean the house?
Dorm rooms are small. The daughter says she is managing this.
I completely agree with post 85.
Maybe I have a weird sense of humor, but why do we never hear stories about a roommate that expects a neatnick to put all their stuff on the floor and leave the place a wreck? I think the right solution is to alternate weeks of keeping the room spotless and keeping the room a wreck. 
I am reading this thread with great interest and plan to share with my son in the conversation about being a good roommate next year. I fully expect that the bed can be smoothed over and sheets washed every week (I make him do that at home anyway). The sink should be cleaned after every use, and vacuuming every week isn’t onerous in most cases. However, as long as it doesn’t contain food or garbage, how he sets up his desk is his business because everyone works best in the environment that works for them. And I’m going to confess and claim my shame. I do not wash my windows at home every week and never have in my entire life. I don’t expect my son to wash any windows at college except under special circumstances.
It’s too bad that mom stepped in to defend the sloppiness rather than let these two girls work on a plan that keeps them both happy. Likely the bed not made neat looking, the stuff on the floor, the general mess are not going to be OK with the neat roommate, and honestly that is a bit much to put on a girl who is sharing a common space and wants to be in a room that is tolerable and can even have someone drop by.
By just telling your daughter that her roommate is nuts rather than “go work that out, you know I think your room has been a mess for the last 4 years”, you have told her not to compromise and may just have doomed her to be messy all her life.
The cleaning can be arranged somehow, if the messy one has nothing on the floor, vacuuming will take maybe 5 minutes. Bathrooms should be cleaned whenever they look grungy, including toothpaste, dirty mirrors, and all that. I am not sure anyone would care who does this, unless your daughter never helps and sits on her bed mumbling “this is nuts”.
Any shared place needs to be kept to some shared standard. If your daughter’s need for clutter and well, laziness, prevents her from following a fairly neat person’s standards, she needs to find a fellow messy person. Don’t expect to be thrilled when you see the room though, it is going to be a horrific mess. What it might do is convince your daughter that messiness also has it’s price, digging through the clutter on the floor from two people to find a glove or an important piece of paper may show her that.
Unless this settles down (including your daughter admitting she overreacted), the next piece of advice should be to talk to an RA who may have some good advice for both of them.
Here’s a simple reason the questionnaires used to pair up roommates don’t always work: there can be room changes throughout the summer. My D got one assignment in June, another in July, and then her final assignment in early August, about 10 days before school started. D had readily admitted to being about a 3 on the neatness scale, whereas her roommate is more like an 8 or 9. While those preferences might have been taken into account initially, they tend to go out the window when res life is trying to deal with summer melt and fit everyone into an overfull dorm.
Anyway, my D recognizes that the room is fairly small, so she is trying to be neater (making the bed daily, clothing either into the laundry basket or back in the closet/drawer, and yes, she brought Lysol wipes for the sink in their room). She notified me a few days ago that, “You know, Mom, it’s really not that hard to make the bed each day.” Yes, I am well aware of that; and although 18 years under my roof didn’t convince you, I’m glad you picked it up now.
One thing you can’t account for is decorating taste. My D send a few photos of their room. Roomie’s desk looked like something out a magazine; very neat, with color coordinated accessories. My D’s desk area looked purely functional: lamp, laptop, some books–not messy, but not “pretty.” The wall over roommate’s bed had a few small, tasteful posters. My D’s side, in her words, “looks like Bennigan’s”. Posters of all sizes, a white board/calendar, school stuff she’s already gotten as giveaways/prizes, and 30-40 photos. I think it looks colorful and fun, but it’s probably not what her roommate would have selected. That’s OK; neither girl has ever shared a room, so this is a learning experience for both of them.
@riverbirch thanks for the info. But still that video on FlyLady TV…
Some of us tolerate mess better than others. I just wanted to note that I do not think all messy people can more easily handle neatness than neat people can handle mess. In particular, I am imagining the neat girl loudly sighing as she cleans the windows every week–I’ve seen this kind of passive-aggressive behavior in the name of neatness too many times.
I guess where I went to school, we mostly had lofted beds, so no one could tell if they were made. Thank goodness–I’m not a bed maker.
Yes those lofted beds where not conducive to a made bed!
I’m the one who said that messy people can cope with neatness better than neat people can cope with messiness.
I wasn’t talking about the experience of cleaning. I understand that a person who doesn’t feel the need to clean often might resent having to do it because of another person’s preferences.
I was talking about the experience of living in the room (or house or apartment). A neat person may be constantly distressed by a messy environment and may feel unable to invite guests to that place because the messiness is embarrassing. A messy person may be annoyed by the effort required to create neatness but is unlikely to be uncomfortable or embarrassed about living in a neat place.
If you’re messy, how do you feel when you find yourself in a neat environment – like a hotel room? You probably don’t feel any discomfort at all. On the other hand, neat people who find themselves in messy environments do feel discomfort.