<p>Wow! I may not be a “perfect” houseguest, but cannot imagine helping myself to a hostess’ clothing or money! Definitely more food for folks considering “house swapping.” What an awful bunch of experiences. I like the bed in the woods idea. We also have tents and futons that folks could use to sleep on. 
So far, have only had close friends & family sleep over–mostly friends.</p>
<p>Cobrat, I think you should take up the bagpipes!</p>
<p>deb922 - My future MIL, named Deb, plays bagpipes. It scares the living daylights out of her cats. </p>
<p>We’ve been having a surprising amount of guests to our apartment, and I have to say mostly they’ve been very well-behaved. Most of these friends are still in college, and our friend, let’s call him D, usually gets sent down with a cooler full of goodies from his parents. My own person favorite was his dad’s homemade deer sticks, prepared from their latest buck. Yum! Another friend, T, tends to help with the cooking.</p>
<p>We do know one family though who has bred two very poor house guests. Brother and sister, R and J, respectively, routinely break things and eat far more than their fair share. We had R over with a bunch of the other friends, and he proceeded to lean back in an older, fragile chair that was never intended to be leaned back in, breaking it. I’m still trying to figure out how to fix it. We also did pasta for dinner one evening and he took over half of the alfredo sauce to himself before anybody else had a chance to have any. This guy is also just generally disgusting. He will put his feet up on furniture with his shoes on, and when you tell him to take his shoes off, he puts his bare feet up on the furniture and plays with his toes. Also, he chomps his food to an extent that I have never encountered with anyone else in my life. When you call him out on it, he refuses to stop, claiming that it hurts his jaw to chew properly. </p>
<p>I do feel bad because over the years we have come to believe he probably has Asperger’s or some other undiagnosed mild form of autism. That being said, his parents have let him get away with acting like a boar his whole life which certainly doesn’t help matters. He went to the same college as my fiance and I, and his mother drove to visit. She was asking him a question about the Halloween costume she was helping him put together. He, playing his DS, responded, “Can’t you see I’m busy, you d0uche?” If he treats his own mother that way it’s no wonder he’s barely tolerable to have as a guest…</p>
<p>I’m curious about Ms. Schwab’s “friend” who set her up with the outrageous houseguest. Who sics a stranger on a family with a pregnant mom and toddler?</p>
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<p>No thanks. A bit too old-school and I don’t feel like get tossed out by my building’s co-op board for excessive cringeworthy noise. </p>
<p>You have any idea how LOUD bagpipes can get in an apartment building? :p</p>
<p>My H had his college roommate home for Thanksgiving one year, and his mother still, to the day she died, never stopped talking about how much the boy ate. He was a tall skinny Italian from Miami, and she never knew where he put it all.</p>
<p>Years later, the college roommate came to visit us, staying with another friend, but we took him out to dinner at an All You Can Eat cajun place that was doing quite well and had excellent food. The next week, the place closed down, and we still laugh to this day about our friend’s visit putting the place out of business. </p>
<p>Inside tale, anyone who has ever been to JazzFest and had Mrs. Wheat’s Meat Pies there, this was their place. Can you imagine getting to eat those, plus the best red beans and rice and etouffee and creole, all in one place, to your heart’s content? We will never forgive our friend for taking that away from us.</p>
<p>I brought a friend home from college to the house my parents had lived in for 30 years. My father was a large man (6’3" and football player build). My friend was short and quite rotund (but she certainly didn’t weigh more than my dad). Somehow she broke the toilet loose from the floor! We still couldn’t figure out how she did it, but after her visit, it wobbled when you sat down.</p>
<p>Another foreign houseguest who visited my parents was not familiar with our bathroom set up. He used the toilet, but did not put the seat up. He probably didn’t turn the light on so as not to disturb anyone, so his aim was questionable. My mom got up early in the morning and sat down without looking. Ewwww! I’m surprised she didn’t scream! </p>
<p>Said guest also took a shower. There was a shower head, but we never used it so there was no shower curtain. He proceeded to douse the entire (carpeted) bathroom.</p>
<p>Failing to RSVP to your cousin’s wedding. Then texting or emailing the MOB an hour before the ceremony to ask if you can bring your girlfriend. After being told that you can’t, show up with her anyway.</p>
<p>That’s allegedly what Conor Kennedy did…of course, the girlfriend was Taylor Swift.</p>
<p>After reading this entire thread, my nominations for the “worst guest” winners are:</p>
<p>Honorary mentions to the female wedding guest at the reception, on all fours pretending to be a mechanical bull and being ridden by a male guest… and the people who moved the table numbers/changed the seating assignments to suit themselves (there were multiple cases)… </p>
<p>3rd place: 12RMH’s future brother in law reading the Farmer’s Almanac and commenting on castrating cows while a toast was being held to honor HIS engagement.</p>
<p>2nd place: The bar mitzvah guest who announced that they didn’t believe in religion and wouldn’t set foot in a synagogue, but wanted to come to the party anyway (and then made outrageous demands)</p>
<p>WINNER: The MIL who came for a “visit” (while the wife was pregnant) and never left, staying for 15 years until she died.</p>
<p>(jonri, what I don’t understand is why an EIGHTEEN year old was expected to send his own RSVP - shouldn’t his RSVP have been included with his family’s? And why is no one noticing that Taylor Swift is robbing the cradle? She’s 22, and she’s dating an 18 year old - didn’t he just graduate from high school? Why is he expected to be an adult - he’s a kid!)</p>
<p>And in the horrible host category, we have a winner: The housewarming party that didn’t actually allow guests to go inside the house, even though it was raining.</p>
<p>My MIL, on one visit, took down all the artwork and pictures and put them back up in a location she liked better.</p>
<p>Another time we got home from running and errand and she had completely emptied all the kitchen cabinets and drawers and was putting stuff back in according to how she thought things should be organized.</p>
<p>A third time, she decided a curled-up edge of wallpaper in the bathroom bothered her somehow, so she grabbed it and ripped a giant piece of wallpaper off of the wall.</p>
<p>Another time… eh, I could go on all day.</p>
<p>A couple we were friends with, who had moved out of the area, email’ed us saying they would be in town and could they stay with us for the night. Oh, and they wanted to see all their old friends so could we invite the following list of 20 people to our house for a party.</p>
<p>I’ve been feeling a little beat-up and abused by my extended family lately, so reading this thread was good medicine. I’ve also been thinking back on the cringe-worthy memories of my own episodes as a bad guest or bad host.</p>
<p>THANKS (I think :o) for the second place award, lafalum, but I haven’t posted yet about the cr*p my BIL pulls over and over, and it is prizeworthy. Makes my blood boil just to think about it, so I haven’t posted. Maybe after my massage I’ll feel more relaxed and able to throw a few tidbits into the pile. One is kinda long because it just kept going and going and going…</p>
<p>As a guest, I had a weird request from the hostess.<br>
Lovely former neighbors were back in town and a mutual “friend” was hosting a casual cookout for them (10 of us in total). When rsvp’ing, I naturally asked hostess what I could bring (in addition to wine). She asked me to bring jars of yellow mustard, Jack Daniels Honey dijon mustard, BBQ sauce, caesar dressing and shrimp cocktail sauce. I thought, we must be having caesar salad, bbq’d shrimp, chicken and burgers.</p>
<p>We arrive with requested items. Hostess put yellow mustard on table–and then put the rest of the jars in her cupboard, never to make an appearance that night! We had burgers (no ketchup, she must have forgot to ask me for that), beans and tossed salad (not caesar). Quickly went thru the 4 bottles of wine the guests brought…and nothing else was offered.</p>
<p>Hostess does have reputation for being cheap, but really???</p>
<p>Gosmom, I think you went grocery shopping for her and didn’t know it.</p>
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<p>At a birthday party that was being hosted by a friend I never met previously, I felt it was weird when he asked me and the birthday boy to stay and “help” clean up his apartment. </p>
<p>To add insult to injury, it really consisted of was us doing all of the cleanup because the host was “too tired”. </p>
<p>In my extended family, one is never supposed to ask party/house guests to perform any chores unless one is elderly/has serious disabilities. Moreover, one should NEVER ask guests one hasn’t known previously or especially the BIRTHDAY BOY…especially considering he’s older than the both of us. </p>
<p>Had to fight the feeling of being taken aback and familial programming that his behavior would be considered that of a lazy and/or extremely ill-mannered host who wasn’t raised correctly. </p>
<p>Is it ever ok to ask the birthday boy/girl to help with the cleanup on his/her birthday or one of his/her friends whom you’ve never met before to perform the entire cleanup afterwards?</p>
<p>Worst guest goes to… My aunt! Her mother (my grandmother) is very ill and does not have a good prognosis. She has really high medical costs so my grandfather had to take her out of the hospital and become the caretaker (incredibly difficult, I won’t go in depth). </p>
<p>My aunt, who does nothing but sit at home all day, refused to come visit her ill mother (a few hours drive away). She finally came when my grandfather paid her $1600 to come over!! Then she thought her parent’s house was too small, so she requested more money from him so she could stay in a hotel</p>
<p>Ugh…the last two summers I have hosted my husband’s brother and his wife ,as well as two of their friends who came from Sweden…thank goodness we are not doing it again this year. It is so much work for me and they have one to expect it to be over the top elaborate with the food and don’t even offer to help with the clean up</p>
<p>Last summer , we took them to Lancaster , Pa , which is pretty unique and fun to see. I don’t get a day off at all during the summer months, so we were pretty excited to get a much needed break. I wanted to go to the Amish indoor farm market because I dig all the fresh foods and all , but they insisted that we spend the time in McDonalds so that they could take advantage of the free wifi and gaze at their iPhones. Not a lot of fun for us having a very rare day off to spend it at the golden arches</p>
<p>Wow, Notrichenough, not sure your MIL is MEANT to ever be a guest in a home. Wow–with relatives like that, who needs enemies?</p>
<p>I still remember visiting a loved one for a holiday break. EVERY TIME I mentioned something her fiance had not heard of before (some esoteric fact or another), I would be asked in a very confrontational tone, “Is that true or did you just make it up?” “What are your sources for that statement?” It was really a weird visit and unnerved me because I had never met someone like that before. They married & have been together >30 years now–I’m still not very close to him & he was VERY irked when my H beat him in Trivial Pursuit & won’t play us again.</p>
<p>Not sure it was so much a “bad guest” thing.</p>
<p>There was an interesting mother-daughter dynamic where my MIL was basically incapable of seeing my wife as an independent, grown woman who owned her own house and could run her own household, so MIL had to step in and “fix” things.</p>
<p>I wanted to do the picture thing when we visited the in-laws, but DW talked me out of it. It would have gone right over her head anyway.</p>