Your housemate works in air conditioning and drives in an air-conditioned car. When he comes home he finds the house unbearably hot. You work outside in the hot sun and love to have the windows open. So what if the house is 80 degrees – it’s summer!
Ooops! You have a disagreement. What do you do? [...]
Posts under ‘Keeping Good Housemates’
Turning Down the Heat on Housemate Conflicts
You Need Doors!
Which do you prefer? The modern condo with an open floor plan and cathedral ceilings? Or the pre-war rambling house with multiple rooms with doors, nooks and crannies. If you are sharing housing with unrelated people, you should prefer the latter.
These spaces allow individuals to have privacy even when others are home. Think about it [...]
What to Do When You Have an Issue
There’s a good blog post on “When Sharing Hits the Fan” written by Emily Doskow, (author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community) in which Emily describes the how managing expectations, anticipating obstacles, and agreeing on how to resolve problems are essential for a good sharing relationship. While [...]
Ten Household Items You Don’t Have to Own
Saving money in shared housing is not just saving on the cost of housing. You also save because you can share the basic housewares. Below is list of some of the more common machines used.
Vacuum Cleaner
Toaster Oven
Toaster
Iron
Blender
Food Processor
Lawnmower
Can Opener
Coffee Maker
Coffee Grinder
And those are just household small appliances. Setting up a household also requires trash cans, [...]
Sex and Your Housemate
One word. Don’t. Don’t even think of it. Do yourself a favor.
For housemates to live together comfortably, it is good to impose a complete and utter taboo on sex with each other. Otherwise things go wonky. The emotions that get stirred up are deep and painful. One person’s fling is another person’s crush and what [...]
Can Single Parents Share Housing?
Absolutely. In addition to the other benefits of reducing housing costs, there are other advantages for two single parents sharing their home. How well it works depends of course on the adults, the children, and the space being shared.
The first advantage is that the children can play together. This of course depends on the [...]
Software to the Rescue-Housemate’s Companion
Confused by the bills you need to track in your shared home? Tired of using an spreadsheet and working out the formulas? Housemate’s Companion by Slamdunk Software comes to your rescue. It’s brand new and looks exactly like the basic tool that everyone needs. It not only offers easy management of the bills, it sends [...]
Methods to divide chores
Every home needs to be cleaned. When people share housing the question arises about how the common areas that everyone uses are cleaned. Here are three methods that work.
Hire a Pro
If you can afford it, the easiest, best way to get the house cleaned is to have someone else do it. Seriously – once every [...]
Messy Housemates
Sometimes I find myself grumbling about mess in the house, something along the lines of “Why doesn’t he EVER clean up after himself?” Years of experience have taught me to look again. Oh, I say to myself, “That’s mine and that’s mine and that’s mine..” It is a very natural human tendency to look at [...]
Four Degrees of Sharing
Authors and attorneys, Janelle Orsi and Emily Doskow, have developed a model they call “four degrees of sharing”. The first degree requires minimal cooperation and no planning, while the fourth degree requires extensive cooperation and long-term planning. The whole model can be read here:
They assign sharing rental housing or a single family home to the [...]