The fire condemned her old house and almost killed her friend, she said, and the thing that started it was her roommate’s car battery, abandoned on the porch.

Oregon State University Student Jessica Bean said she had been telling him to haul it to a disposal site for months before she moved out. It just wasn’t safe to leave a battery, especially a large battery, out.

But according to her, he wouldn’t listen to her warnings, and this wasn’t the only issue they’d had while living together.

Bean explained that one time, there was this rotten smell in the house.

“It was absolutely, like, gagging, gag-worthy—and I got blamed for this smell,” Bean said. “What it ended up being was my roommate’s potato pot. It was never my dish that smelled, it was somebody else’s dish that smelled, and I got crap for it, like, every other day for a month.”

Roommate disagreements are common, according to OSU Resident Advisor Miguel Pantoja.

Pantoja said students often go in assuming they’ll be friends with their roommate.

“This ideal/naive mindset prevents them from considering the possibilities that concerns or issues may occur even if they are friends,” Pantoja said.

According to Pantoja, communication can solve most current or potential issues.

UHDS has a website with a list of topics and advice for communication.

Bean said she’s learned a lot from her experiences with previous roommates and reflected on her lack of communication with them.

According to Bean, she didn’t even know they were moving in.

“I came home from an hour-long commute to work, and there was a U-haul in the driveway,” Bean said. “It was a very surprising type of situation to come into.”

Bean said that for the first six months after the two new roommates moved in with her and her boyfriend, she did 80% of the cleaning.

“I was the only female, and I think that was a part of it,” Bean said. “But I think it was also a personality thing.”

According to Bean, she would try to get the others to clean up more.

“People just weren’t into that for whatever their reasons were, and they thought that I was being pushy,” Bean said.

Six months in, Bean says she ended up getting depressed.

“I stopped cleaning, and nobody else gave a damn, to be honest,” Bean said. “Since I had taken up all that slack in the first six months, I got a lot of shit…I got things blamed on me, and told that I never clean anything.”

One of the lessons Bean learned was to not make a habit of cleaning up after your roommates. “That can become an expectation,” Bean said. “Then if you stop doing it, then you’re the bad guy.”

But it’s not all horrible. Bean remarked about the good experiences she had with other roommates.

“Sometimes it’s sharing food,” Bean said. “Food is something that people have bonded over since the beginning of human history.”

Bean also recounted coming home to find a Rube Goldberg machine made from dominos and string and pipes and paper and tidbits that would shoot a gummy bear into her mouth.

“My biggest tip is to come into the dorms understanding everyone has different upbringings and communication styles when feelings of concern arise,” Pantoja said. “Some grew up with the idea that anything in the fridge is fair game, while others only grab what they purchase. Small things like this combined with miscommunication will lead to one party feeling their roommate is stealing their stuff while they are completely in the blind.”

Bean said to talk about things like food and chores ahead of time to set up expectations. According to her, if the food is going to be shared, grocery bills have to be shared.

She also recommends making a chore chart.

“If you’re in a shared living space with other people and there’s just the most basic of things that need to be done, then to make it fair for everybody and to make it a comfortable living space, make a chart like a white-board with dry-erase markers.”

If you get into an argument with a roommate, you can go to your resident advisors for help mediating.

“Our job in this situation is to help create a space where (roommates) feel comfortable to express what’s on their minds but to also prevent a hostile turmoil during the process,” Pantoja said.

To help facilitate communication, Pantoja said roommates can fill out the roommate agreement in their housing portal, which provides discussion prompts on common topics of issue among roommates.

If all else fails, they can help you talk to a resident director, area director or other executive and get on a waitlist to change rooms.