How Marie Kondo helped us uncover our flatmate’s shocking secret

The Age’s opinion section is rolling out a series of summer pieces on the theme of ‘My Best, My First, My Worst’. These stories, penned by Age writers, range from humorous to poignant and thought-provoking tales of love, loss and summer fun.

Share-housing is one of those strange rites of passage for twenty-somethings.

Throw three or four young people into a house together and the result can be a fun blur of late nights and drinking games, an illuminating exercise of your own values and sense of self or a nightmare made of endless piles of dirty dishes and fatefully mismatched timetables. More often than not, it’s all the above.

“We bonded over our love of op-shopping, loud shirts, red wine and rich pasta sauces”: Sophie Aubrey (left) with her flatmate Pip.

I’ve lived in share-houses where winters were spent plodding around wrapped in thick blankets because inner-city terraces have zero insulation or heating, where housemates were allergic to any form of cleaning, where mice roamed freely or where kick-ons were held, and not always to every tenant’s delight.

In most of my share-houses I lived with friends I’d met through uni, until one year I decided I wanted to experiment with living with complete strangers. I was in the phase of my 20s where half my friends were studying, half were entering their “career jobs”. I started working full-time and thought it might be fun to live with other young professionals. So after responding to an ad on Gumtree, I moved into a four-bedroom house on Gold Street, Brunswick, with two lawyers and a textile designer.

It was one of those homes that had been a share-house for years, with a lease rolling over, passing from housemate to housemate. There was mottled furniture and a mishmash of crockery left behind through the house’s various chapters. There were cleaning and bathroom products that sat unused, probably expired, and miscellaneous food tins that none of us had bought.

Share-housing can be a blessing or a nightmare.Credit: Shutterstock

We had the odd chores dispute – particularly over the bathroom shared between three of us – but for the most part, things were good. Other than hosting a few parties and attending some events together, mostly we just worked and quietly caught up in the evenings if we happened to be home.

Over the course of a few months, I got close to one of my housemates, Pip. We bonded over our love of op-shopping, loud shirts (although I could never understand how her wardrobe was so neatly colour-coded), red wine and rich pasta sauces. We went for crisp evening walks and runs at Princes Park or hungover weekend pump classes. She got used to me eating her peanut butter and I got used to her bursts of neurotic cleaning.

After the textile designer announced he was moving out, Pip decided to pull a Marie Kondo on some cupboards that had not been opened in years. She opened up a drawer filled with paperwork and uncovered some documents for our lease.

We’d been paying our rent each month to one of the lawyers, Peter (not his real name). He was one of those guys who signed up for yoga in part to sleep with women, and he could be a little sloppy around the house, but it wasn’t dramatic. He did, however, as the one who’d lived in the house the longest, have by far the biggest room, and took control of the living area. He was usually the one on the couch commandeering the TV.

Fun, games and share-housing: Flatmates Sophie and Pip.

Pip called me over and waved a piece of paper at me. She’d found a document showing our house’s monthly rent cost. Our jaws dropped. Some quick maths unmistakably concluded that we were being swindled. We were fully subsidising the rent of a well-paid lawyer. He hadn’t been paying a cent for lord knows how long.

Maddened, we came up with a plan of attack. We decided we would demand we stay a three-person household instead of four, and that he start paying his share of the rent. Peter was slouched on the couch when we confronted him. Apart from a slightly dazed smile, he remained strangely unexpressive. There wasn’t the slightest twinge of guilt. It was as though he’d been waiting for us to realise.

He agreed to our terms, but this was the beginning of the end for Gold Street. Turns out it’s not easy to live with someone you know is comfortable with screwing you over.

We made plans to leave the house within a few months. I returned to living with friends and my share-housing phase of life ended less than a year later when I moved in with my now-husband.

Gold Street was in a way my worst share-house. I’ve had housemates who brought over strange characters at 6am and broke belongings, or who freely ate my bread and drank my vodka, but I didn’t have money-thieving housemate on my house-sharing bingo card.

Still, you learn that share-housing is about taking the good with the bad, and Gold Street ticked both extremes: it was also my best. Partly because I was in that stage of early adulthood where I felt I was reaching financial stability and was growing more at ease with who I was post-university. But mainly because by living there, I met one of my closest friends. And I’d take being cheated out of rent money in exchange for those wintry walks with Pip any day.

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