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 two weeks by a professional will avoid quite a lot of conflict about the quantity and quality of housecleaning.  Since you are saving money by sharing housing, you might be able to afford this option.

Rotate Chores Weekly

Figure out how many chores you have and divide them equally among the housemates. Decide if these chores are done weekly or every other week. Put chores in a set order and housemates in a set order and every week the chore shifts to the next person.

Areas of Responsibility

Create equitable areas of responsibility (vacuuming common rooms, taking out trash and recycling, washing kitchen floor, etc. ) divide them among housemates by preference. Each person is responsible for their area for a month. They can ask for a change at the end of the month. If no one wants a change each person keeps their area of responsibility.

Note

Obviously everyone has to carry their weight in actually doing their assigned chores.

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 what others are doing and assign blame before examining ourselves and our role in contributing to the situation we don’t like. It’s the “pot calling the kettle black” or the interesting question, “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but fail to see the beam in your own eye?”

So when you are upset by a messy housemate, the first thing you need to do is consider whether you have contributed to the situation. For instance, are you upset about the dirty dishes left in the sink today but last week you left dishes for two days? Did you neglect to do your chore but now you are irritated that your housemate hasn’t done hers? How have you contributed to your housemates neglect?

If you can in all honesty say that your slate is clean and the housemate’s behavior really is a problem, you need to have a conversation.  It’s possible that housemate has no idea that you are upset. Really. There’s no need to get mad or have a fight. A simple matter-of-fact conversation setting some guidelines for mess should take care of it. Try to be specific about what bothers you. Work together on an agreement that can help you move forward. If your housemate has specific requests of you, you too can adjust your behavior.

All the above assumes that you have a basic agreement about the cleanliness of your home. You made this agreement in the interview process, right? In that interview you talked about your attitudes and expectations for the cleanliness of your home. Your standards were similar enough that you chose to live together. If you didn’t talk about cleanliness then, you may have a harder time talking about it now because no standards were set and no expectations established. If your housemate has standards really different from your own, and you are each unwilling to adapt to the the other a bit, you may not be able to live together.

Sharing housing is a cooperative arrangement for the mutual benefit of everyone living in the house.

Do you have a story about living with messy housemates? How did you handle it?

Oh yuck… you open the fridge and it’s full of nasty containers of dead stuff. Or is it? Who knows? You know they aren’t yours, so you can’t throw them out. Can you? No, you can’t.

Allotting Space in the Fridge

The refrigerator in most house-share situations is a communal appliance. And it is THE central appliance Everyone uses it. So how do you use share it successfully?  Best plan is to have areas for each person in the house share. Top shelf, bottom shelf, left-hand crisper,  etc. Just make an agreement as part of the moving in process. Lay it out and make it clear whose area is whose.

It just doesn’t work to be loosey-goose about this. We all forget stuff in the fridge.  That left-over from the Chinese restaurant? The half can of soup?  Whose onion is turning soft and liquid? Things simply get lost and then it then they get yucky. The fridge becomes a mess quickly.

Cleaning the fridge

Speaking of messes. Communal refrigerators lend themselves to being crowded and moldy. So here’s what you do. At an agreed upon time (Sunday evening, Saturday morning, whatever works where the most people are home) one person takes everything out of the refrigerator and places it on counters and tables. With the fridge now empty, the same person cleans the fridge. Then each person has a certain amount of time to retrieve items from the counters and return them to their area of the fridge. A reasonable amount of time might be two hours.  At the conclusion of that time, the person cleaning the fridge takes everything left on the counters and throws it out.  Voila! you now have a clean fridge.

Note: see future posts on how to manage other housecleaning