Unsure if this is posted in the correct forum - didn't see any kind of "Housing" board?
Anyway, just had a confrontation with a housemate of mine and just want to see what other people think. I'll give a bit of background info.
I've been sharing houses for 4+ years now, always single tenancy, never lived with friends. I've seen it all. I've had noisey housemates, unclean housemates, I've been stolen from, had people take advantage of me and even had a landlord try and palm £1000's worth of council tax onto me (unsucceessfully). I'm at a point in my life now where I'm not willing to jump through the hoops of treading on eggshells to keep housemates from potentially hating me.
In my current house, I've lived here since August 2016 and have seen housemates come and go. Some I have got along with brilliantly, others not so much. At the moment it is me (female), another girl and three lads. The lads are incredibly unclean, leaving dirty dishes, pots and pans to fester next to the sink for days, if not weeks, at a time.
Roll forward to the run up to the Christmas just gone, and the other girl and two of the lads leave to, I assume, go home for Christmas so it's me and the one remaining lad in the house. He is pretty filthy but on his own it's manageable. I didn't have the luxury of going home for Christmas due to work commitments so I was left with the used cutlery, plates, oven dishes and pans in a pile next to the kitchen sink (which had already been there for a good few days before anyone even left the house). I ignore it for a few days and then the cleaners come (as they do weekly) and moved that pile from the counter to the sink so they could clean the kitchen surfaces. I then left the stuff in the sink for another few days and had to use the tiny drainer to wash my own things. It got to a point where the stuff in the sink was beginning to smell, and badly. I became tired of this and started to think about my own health. Here I am trying to clean things next to something that is full of dirt and rancid half-eaten food. So I put it all into a bin bag and set it by the back door on the kitchen floor. That stuff sat there for over another week still, as the cleaners came back around the Wednesday after Christmas. And they threw the bin bag out.
Roll forward and one of the lads came back and didn't say anything about it, didn't query any missing items so I just assume he doesn't care. But tonight I was confronted by the other one who went away over Christmas. He asked where his things were and I explained what happened. They were in the sink for a while, started to smell, I put it in a bin bag and then the cleaners must've thrown it out. He starts to say how that's basically theft and now he can't cook, he has so go out and buy new things now because >I< threw his stuff away. I explained that I didn't throw it all out, and that maybe he should have some more consideration, both for the communal areas and his own property. Then he called me a *****, lmao.
Anyway, I don't deal well with confrontation really and I get a bit flustered when I have someone in my face having a go at me. I'm just wondering what's the next best step, if any at all? I thought about complaining to my land lord but maybe that's a bit too much. If he complains about me, do I have anything to worry about? I didn't steal his things, that's laughable and I didn't personally throw them out either so what would he have to complain about? I guess he'll live out his tenancy hating me and I do feel quite bad for what I did in hindsight, maybe I over-reacted but what does he expect? For other people to live around his filth?