5 Essentials for Living with Roommates

If you want to keep the peace between you and your roommates, here are a few must-have home essentials that you want to keep handy around your apartment.

1.  Headphones-

When you live with roommates, you know that privacy is often hard to come across. Trying to study when your roommates are blasting their music, having a party or even just simply watching TV can obviously make it pretty hard to concentrate.

This is where noise-cancelling headphones come in handy, and trust me, they are definitely worth the investment. When you put these headphones on, you’ll have instant peace and quite. I certainly would have enjoyed these last year when my roommates would decide t wake up at 5 a.m. and make what seemed to be ten smoothies with what seemed to be the loudest blender available for purchase.

2. Have a chore schedule- There’s a lot of chores to be done around the apartment; for example: taking out the trash, cleaning the floors, doing the dishes and making sure the bathrooms stay clean and sanitized. You would think that with several roommates, all of these tasks would get done easily and quickly.

But the trouble with living with multiple people is that everyone assumes that the other person will do it. This will keep happening until the garbage in the kitchen is literally spilling out on the floor.

Mapping out who does what and on what days, and posting the schedule up on the front of the fridge where everyone can see it, is an efficient way to make sure that everyone will know what their task of the week is. This way there is no excuse for the dishes to not be cleaned or the carpet to not be vacuumed. This task list also makes it easy to acknowledge who to politely remind if a certain task doe not get accomplished.

3.  Power strips-

Last semester, three of my roommates and I would all sit in the living room together and tackle our homework. However, four people means four laptops. When you consider everything that’s already plugged into the walls in your living room, like lamps and TV’s, there is not a lot of extra outlet space, especially to have four additional laptops to be plugged in. By investing in a power strip everyone can happily keep their devices plugged in and charged which can also help void off potential arguments.

4.  A shower caddy-

You may not be in a dorm, but that doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t benefit from a shower caddy. This item will help maintain an organized bathroom and also help to keep everyone using their own shampoos and body soaps. Without caddies, shampoo and conditioner bottles, body wash, razors and anything else that is used in the bathroom will all get mixed up with one another and soon enough you go to use your shampoo and its completely out because your roommates have been using it.

5. Kitchen labels-

Sharing a kitchen with multiple people can be a recipe for disaster and a catalyst for many arguments. The best way to get past this is to have labels. Right now in my apartment each of us have a shelf in the fridge, which is labeled clearly with our name on it. We also have shelves in the pantry, which are also clearly labeled. This, so far, has prevented any fights about who used what. We also have a shelve in the fridge for dressings and condiments that are clearly labeled for anyone’s use, because in reality there is no reason to have four ranch dressings and four tubs of butter. I think clearly labeling your kitchen will prevent many potential arguments between roommates and keep everyone in the household happy.