College Room-Mates Off-Campus: What Works, What Doesn't - Keeping the Peace

Living Off-Campus with Room-Mates Can Be Great, If Everyone's Considerate

You've moved off-campus with some room-mates. You've planned ahead and avoided serious pitfalls. Now it's time to work out how to routinely run your life jointly with several room-mates in the same house. Some issues could fester and ruin a perfectly good off-campus home life. Following the suggestions below on a routine basis can minimize friction.

Off-Campus Routine Issue #1 with Room-Mates - Tidy vs. Neat

Nobody enjoys living with a room-mate who is much more of a slob than they are. On the other hand, a neat-freak can really get irritating too. Find a workable compromise where even if nobody is happy, at least none of the room-mates is pushed into a murderous rage.

Have the slob wash his dishes (or put them in the dishwasher if your kitchen has one). Have a bin where the neat-freak is allowed to dump any stuff left in the joint spaces for more than a couple of days. Once the slob has to dig through everybody's stuff in the "lost-and-found" bin two or three times for his textbooks he may start leaving his mess in his own room.

Set up a rotation for cleaning the joint spaces, or set up a schedule when everyone works together until the house is clean enough for all the room-mates. You can probably get away with far less cleaning than mom required back home, but try to keep things a notch or two above "nasty."

Off-Campus Routine Issue #2 with Room-Mates - Personal Hygiene

This is a tough one. If one of your room-mates tends to take showers only during a full moon, you may need to have a delicate discussion. It isn't cool for one room-mate (or two) to stink up the place for everyone else. This is one aspect of personal behavior where poor manners simply cannot be tolerated in the close confines of your off-campus house.

Off-Campus Routine Issue #3 with Room-Mates - Scheduling Laundry