Sharing Space with Housemates

How do you share space with housemates? Do they share a kitchen? Do you have your own bathroom? How do you keep things separate?

These are all questions that I get a lot. If you have more questions that I don’t address in this post, please comment below and I’ll reply or do another post on it!

Set Up

Our house is a five bedroom, two-and-a-quarter bathroom, two floor home. I’ll spare you a crudely-drawn blue print and just explain. When you enter through the front door, there is the common living space: porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen.  One the main floor there is a full bathroom and two bedrooms. The two bedrooms are currently occupied by two long-term renters. One found us through Airbnb (though the room is not listed with Airbnb and she has her own lease) and the other found us through an alumni page from my university (she also has her own lease). They share the bathroom on the main floor with the basement bedroom guest. The basement is mainly unfinished, but there is a finished area with a bedroom. That room is listed on Airbnb as a long-term option only. It has a minimum stay of 21 days. That room is booked solid through Airbnb through the end of August at this point, with four different guests staying anywhere from three weeks to three months.

On the second floor is our room, another guest room, and a bathroom. The guest room has a sink and vanity (which counts as a 1/4 bath). That guest room is also on Airbnb, but we rarely rent it out. We like to keep it open for when friends or family are visiting, so the calendar on Airbnb is blocked off most of the time. We rented it out for the Super Bowl a few weeks ago, and I think we only have two upcoming guests staying in that room at this point–one in March and another in May. There is definitely a “busy season” for Airbnb in Minneapolis, and that is usually April through September. It’s puzzling why people don’t want to stay here in the dead of winter. 😉

Sharing Space

We have definitely found that three guests is the sweet spot for our house. When I wrote this post in November, we had four guests for a few weeks because one of the gals that was supposed to move out asked to stay a bit longer. When we have more than three guests, they just use our bathroom upstairs, which isn’t much of a hassle and another person really doesn’t affect the overall house feel. I actually purposefully put nice, big mirrors in every rooms so that they are able to get ready in their own rooms and not dominate the bathroom. The place that we run out of space first is the fridge and freezer.

Right now we divide up the fridge into sections. Each housemate has their own shelf/area in the fridge. We could definitely use more space though, or to try to figure out another system. (We are still working out the kinks.) At first, back in August, we did not have designated sections and everyone just labeled/kept track of their food. I didn’t do well with this though because it was disorganized and Collin was always asking me, “is this ours?” So we began divvying up the sections, which works much better. I’ve been thinking about getting mats like this to organize the sections better.

In the freezer, we just label our items and I reorganize the freezer every few weeks. The last round of housemates used the freezer a lot, but this round do not. I think most of the stuff in the freezer right now is just mine and one other girls’.

We have a line of cabinets in the kitchen that are for the housemates. They each get a cabinet with a few shelves inside for their food and pantry items. We ask our housemates not to bring their own appliances, dishes, silverware or cookware, and they just use ours. The exception is obviously if we don’t have something. For example, our current housemates brought a NutriBullet and rice cooker.

If there is someone using the kitchen, then we might wait until it’s clear for us to cook, but we all get home at different times in the evening so we do not usually have issues with crowding the kitchen. For each round of housemates, we like to do a few community dinners. What usually happens is Collin and I get to know each person pretty well, but they don’t usually know each other or interact much. Dinners are a good chance chance to share a meal together and get to know each other. We would like to do this more! One of our good friends lived with a bunch of housemates for a few years and they each had one night per week to cook for everyone. This was more like communal housing, but I still like the idea.

What are some of your ideas for sharing space with roommates or housemates?

Want to try hosting? Use my Airbnb Discount for $40 off your first trip on Airbnb and try it out.

[addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_ovxd”]