I had trouble a while ago with a roommate who was resisting cleaning up his room when I needed to get everyone out to deal with roaches that came in when I was trying to help a friend who needed to look for a new room to rent. He’s still looking and he’s blown multiple opportunities by not having the money saved when he was told to move in. He’s living with his family right now.

The owner of the house was extremely generous and he said he didn’t want to do an eviction or force me to kick anyone out around the holidays but he also didn’t want to wait until January or February to start dealing with the roaches. I paid for everyone to have a storage unit for two months to keep their stuff in while I worked on dealing with the problem. Everyone else got packed up and moved most of their stuff out quickly. The roommate with autism dragged his feet with cleaning up. I told him that he had to get move of his stuff moved out by November or I was going to kick him out because I’m not getting evicted because I have a roommate who filled his room with junk and refuses to clean. There mostly wasn’t actual trash but he had way too much stuff for the room that he was living in.

Right now I’m working on setting clear expectations with him because I don’t want the problem happening again and then I have to kick him out. A lot of his stuff is still in storage which he’s paying for now, so he has to go through it and throw stuff away. I told him while we were cleaning that he could focus entirely on just taking stuff out temporarily and he didn’t need to make a decision at the time, which is what I think saved him because I don’t think he would have been able to get stuff moved out by November if he had been trying to make decisions about what to throw away.

I’ve been talking to him about learning how to throw stuff away because it’s something that he clearly hasn’t got comfortable with. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions that I can give him? It doesn’t matter to me if he wants to perpetually pay for a storage unit to keep stuff in, but if he’s keeping it there long term then he might as well throw it away because obviously he’s not using it.