Living with flatmates always comes with surprises. Some funny, some frustrating, and some downright baffling. One woman recently took to Reddit to vent about a housemate’s questionable laundry habit, only to find herself completely alone in her outrage.
Posting to the ever-popular “Am I the A**hole” forum, she explained that her flatmate washes kitchen towels and bathroom towels in the same load. “I would never do that,” she admitted, before adding that mixing them in the wash isn’t technically her business. What really unsettled her, though, was discovering that her flatmate doesn’t just wash them together but also uses the towels interchangeably afterward.
“I prefer to wash the bathroom and kitchen stuff separately, and each item goes back immediately to where it was before,” she shared, which is what most people would consider standard hygiene. However, when the woman saw that their flatmate had replaced the towel that they once used for dish drying and turned it into a bathroom floor mat while taking the former bathroom floor mat and making it into her new kitchen towel, she was, in her own words, “disgusted.”
I am disgusted by the fact that my flatmate thinks it’s okay to bring what was once the bathroom floor mate into the kitchen, even though it was “washed”.
To justify her concern, she explained that the bathroom towel had been sitting on the floor for weeks, “absorbing poop and pee smell and particles,” not to mention collecting shoe grime and stray hairs. “They think just because they threw that towel in the wash, it’s okay for it to be in the kitchen to be used to dry their dishes and used while cooking,” she complained.
“I personally think what they are doing is disgusting and nonsensical, but again, that’s none of my business. My thing is the kitchen is a shared space between 3 flatmates and me, and my other flatmate feels really uncomfortable about the bathroom floor towel being in the kitchen hanging on the oven handle.”
Shocked by the towel shuffle, she and another flatmate decided to stage what she called an “intervention.” But the conversation quickly soured. Instead of seeing their point, the towel-recycling housemate accused them of “ganging up” and acting like self-appointed “cleanliness police.”
When she turned to Reddit for backup, though, the verdict was nearly unanimous, and not in her favor. Commenters lined up to say she had overstepped. “Their towels, their call,” one user shrugged. Another chimed in: “If the thing is clean, then it’s clean, yes? If you think the bathroom towels are too dirty to be used in the kitchen after a wash, you’d better start buying brand new washing machines so you can separate everything lol.”
Another commenter put it bluntly: “YTA for clearly stating the washing of your flatmate’s towels is none of your business, but then continuing to make it your business.” So, the consensus was clear: even though towel-swapping grossed the Redditor out, it’s still her flatmate’s choice what to do with their own linens. For this Reddit jury, the real breach wasn’t hygiene; it was policing someone else’s laundry habits.
