Compromising with the Roommates

In the past few days, Daniel and I have made some changes to help with the roommate situation and I'm feeling much better. The first thing we did was buy a mini-fridge. Now instead of filling up our fridge with beer, all drinks go in the mini-fridge. That has helped so much. Our refrigerator has much more room and I don't have an anxiety attack every time I open it. We also asked that nobody throw cigarette butts into the garbage. Everyone agreed, but I guess it's hard to remember because the garbage still occasionally smells like smoke. It's so disgusting. The backyard has improved, but not because Dave finally got a storage unit. Instead, he parked his little trailer in the back corner of our yard. Daniel gave in because he thought it was a reasonable compromise. I think it looks terrible in the backyard, but I'm willing to compromise too. I just hope this makes it easier for him to keep all his stuff picked up and not all over the yard.

Finally, we fixed the squeaky floors! For 3 nights in a row our roommates came home around 2 or 3am. I was asleep, of course, and the noise from their floors squeaking woke me up. I couldn't go back to sleep again until they went to bed. The squeak is right at the entrance to Lily and Dave's room which means anytime either of them, or their dog, walk in or out of the room it makes a really loud squeaky noise that keeps me up. I decided that this absolutely had to be fixed before school starts. I am going to be very angry if I can't sleep during the school year. And I know it's not their fault that their floor squeaks, but it was hard for me to not blame them and be annoyed with them for coming in late and waking me up. So we went to Home Depot and asked for help in the flooring department. The employee wasn't optimistic. He told us we could try, but short of replacing the floors (at around $8000) there isn't much you can do about an old wood floor squeaking. We bought some heavy duty screws, and screwed the squeaky floorboards into the joists. Then we filled in the tiny hole with color-matched wood putty. And it worked! It took a lot of screws, but you can't even see them.

I really hope these little things will help keep me sane, and make it easier for the roommates to accommodate us. And I'm trying to be less clean-freakish. But that's hard to do.