Living with your friends might sound like a perfect set up but that doesn’t mean you won’t face a couple of challenges along the way. We’ve got 8 tips to help make living with housemates a little simpler:
1) Put a cleaning rota in place…
For the clean freaks amongst you there will be nothing more satisfying than having a cleaning rota in place, especially if people stick to it. It sounds unnecessary and dull but it’s a good idea to at least allocate a few responsibilities to each person. Even if it’s just a small job like taking out the bins, or giving the kitchen table and surfaces a wipe down, it means that responsibility is shared and you’re each doing your bit to keep your home clean and tidy. Remember you all live together so you should all contribute to keeping the place clean, as leaving your dirty dishes lying around will only annoy the rest of your housemates! Keep it simple and make sure everyone is willing to accept his or her job on the rota.
2) Cook together…
This can be difficult, depending on dietary requirements, but even pairing up to do food shops and evening meals can save money and washing up. When hobs are limited and everyone is hungry at the same time, the kitchen can get a little hectic, so making big meals together could really help you get around this and will also encourage you all to spend some time together as a household.
3) Share your bills…
Nobody wants to be the one left responsible for paying the electricity bill, so why not share the responsibility by sharing bills? Glide simplifies bill payments for every tenant within a house by combining all your monthly bills into an equal split single bill for everyone – meaning no more nasty big bills!
4) Have a group chat…
Whatsapp is a really convenient way to communicate with everyone in the house at once. It can have many uses including asking housemates to pick you up some milk, organising tickets for nights out and politely encouraging each other to do the washing up. However try to avoid using it to send passive aggressive messages about the state of the house because it causes a whole lot of awkward tension!
5) Have a set room for pre drinks…
There are many benefits to this; confined mess, confined noise and more time to avoid cleaning up without causing disruption. Sadly most people don’t have a spare room just for pre-drinks so alternatively, you can just stick to the kitchen rather than spreading mess around the house.
6) Organise group washes…
This is a good way to save money and time as you often find yourself waiting for people’s washes to finish. It also makes it easier to separate your laundry into colours/darks, as it’s often difficult to fill a whole wash with your own clothes, especially if you are washing delicates. If you are worried about clothes getting mixed up you can buy cheap netted wash bags to separate your clothes in the machine.
7) Do activities regularly as a group…
Things can often get a little intense around the house so it’s nice to get out and do things as a group. Being with each other all the time in a confined environment can be claustrophobic, so going out for a meal or doing something different can help to ease the tension every once in a while.
8) Ideally, live with people you get on with…
It makes things a lot easier, and generally it’s a lot more fun to live with your friends than people you’re not as fond of. Although it is awkward to exclude people when choosing whom to live with, in the long run it is worth spending time sorting your housing group carefully.
If you’ve got any tips for making life simple when living with your housemates then we’d love to hear them! You can Tweet us @GlideUK or visit our Facebook page.