Living with people who do not share your standard of cleanliness can be challenging. Maybe your housemate thinks leaving dirty dishes in the sink is okay. Maybe they think wiping down the counters and sweeping counts as cleaning the kitchen. Maybe Becky’s piles of junk are creeping into your half of the room. Whatever the level of severity, you need a solution. You can’t live like this!

The mature thing to do is set out an expected standard and definition for what clean is and to create a chore chart, but nobody wants to do that. It requires communication skills. Here are a few alternatives:

First off, try cleaning in the middle of the night. Your housemates might take offense at your redoing their chores, but only if they can see you doing that. If you clean in the middle of the night, nobody will know it’s you. And if Becky asks who scrubbed the grout between the bathroom tiles with her toothbrush, you can just say elves must have done it.

I acknowledge that this plan has some shortcomings. If your roommates are light sleepers, the vacuum cleaner might wake them up. You might not feel comfortable using strong chemicals near your sleeping roommate. Becky might not believe you about the elves. Luckily, I have a second solution: fake a gas leak.

This may seem extreme, but hear me out. All your housemates will have to evacuate for several hours at minimum, if not several days. This will give you plenty of time to soak every surface in bleach. When your housemates come back, any smell can be blamed on the gas. If they notice things look different than when they left, you can just tell them the carbon monoxide is messing with their heads. If Becky asks why all of her clutter got thrown out and insists her Social Security card was buried somewhere in there, you can just insist that it was the people you called to fix the gas leak. Really, the only flaw is that if you’re not careful, the bleach can ruin your clothes.