people who moved into HMOs with strangers, what was it like?

I’ve had some great times in HMOs but on a whole it was weird, infuriating and pretty miserable. Thankfully that’s a past life and one I don’t miss. Living in London for 7 years meant there was little choice. It really is a fucking lottery though. Lived in a house share in Harrow when I first moved to London; very mixed household and most people kept themselves to themselves but there was one couple who moved in and Christ alive they were awful. Not awful people as such I wouldn’t say, just how they lived; he was a much older man in his 60s who used to get absolutely bladdered most evenings at the pub (I assume) then come back and pass out stood up whilst the hob was on and the oven was on full pelt and billowing out smoke - quite unsettling especially as our bedroom was right beside the kitchen. His partner was a Polish girl (early 40s) who didn’t work and would walk around the house most of the time in her bra and pants whilst drinking Polish lager and smoking fags. She also used to defrost meat on the patio by leaving it out in the sun - very bizarre behaviour. However she was super clean and would sound hours frantically cleaning the whole house. Quite awkward when I wanted to make breakfast and she’d be on her hands and knees in her underwear scrubbing the kitchen floor. After that I moved to house share in SE London and a much nicer area with more to do and better connections - the house was again fine with a mixed bag. Across from me on the landing I had an African girl who would spend her entire evening on Skype to her family on loudspeaker - I asked her once if she needed to borrow some headphones which didn’t go down well. She’d also come home from work and then put instant noodles on the hob with 2 eggs and leave those on boil for ages to the point the noodles would turn into a grey stodge which stunk of putrid eggs and cat shit. Further along the landing there was a younger lad who whilst being friendly and pleasant suffered with some form of epilepsy and would have nightly seizures after spending most of his day/night playing CoD online - I couldn’t help but wonder if the two were perhaps connected? Lastly there was a bloke in his 50s who was your typical PHD type - someone who’d spent his entire life pursuing some form of education and was clearly from money (he told me about his family history and the estate in Scotland his mum lived) Every week he seemed to be trying a new hobby - when I moved in he was learning clarinet and this went on for months…queue endless nights of trying to drown out the sounds of some bloke playing clarinet whilst also taking Japanese lessons over Skype. I lucked out with the last house share I was in in London before leaving there - heard about it through friends of friends and had to go along for a proper house tour/interview with the other housemates. We were all of similar ages, all into loosely similar things; football, music, etc and we all just got on. We’d go to the pub down the road for the quiz, have BBQs in the garden, sit on the decking and smoke and drink and shoot BBs at cans, watch football on the telly, cook roasts and generally just fart about all the time. I’d get home from work on a Friday evening and myself and another housemate would just walk around with our trousers off whilst drinking lager and listening to landfill indie and act like fannies and it just felt good. It was a proper big house too which had been split into two flats but both flats shared the same front door, pretty run down but it felt the most like home to me and I have so many fond memories from the time I stayed there. I only left there after the place needed a new boiler, new heating system, new kitchen & bathroom and the landlord kicked us all out for 6 weeks to renovate it but did offer us all our old rooms back at a much higher rate of rent. Good times, I wouldn’t change any of it though. It’s all flavour in the tapas that is life