Posts under ‘Living Together’

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Here’s an article, published by the AARP on middle-aged single women choosing to live together. It was written in 2007. I wonder how many more people are discovering the pleasures of sharing housing?

Local columnist, Joyce Marcel, writes a insightful column about the relationships between elderly white seniors in Florida living with caretakers coming from different cultures.

The kitchen is the most used common room in a home. When there are housemates, the kitchen is often the place for casual conversation, laughter, and sharing.  It can also be a source of irritation and anger when members of a household don’t have the same standards of cleanliness and/or guidelines are not followed.
It happened [...]

In sharing housing, the kitchen is the center. Everyone has to eat. Few people have the money to eat all their meals out. So how do you share a kitchen?
The easiest is to have separate food. This avoids conflict around shopping, meals, cooking, meal times, tastes, guests, money, etc.  The refrigerator can be divided so [...]

The Golden Rule – “do unto others what you would have them do to you” is key to living well with your housemates.  If you don’t like to walk into a kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink, don’t leave dirty dishes in the sink.  If you want to be told when a housemate is [...]