So, you’re looking to gather all of your friends and move into a spacious home with three or more bedrooms across the way from campus. It honestly sounds like a living situation where you would get to form some of the best memories of your college experience so far. And while having all of your besties just down the hall in a prime college rental for Ohio University students can be exactly that—a fun experience where your bonds as friends only strengthen over the course of the year or two that you live together—it can also delve into not-so-great territory pretty quickly if you’re not careful.
Living with a roommate can be stressful, but adding three, or even four roommates to the mix in some of the biggest rental homes in the area for college students, can be nothing short of chaos if there isn’t clear communication upfront about a variety of topics. Here are some of our best tips and tricks to navigate living with multiple roommates and still managing to have a good experience.
Communication is Key
This is true for almost any interpersonal relationship, but it holds especially true when you’ve decided to live it up in that four bedroom uptown rental with your best friends. Even though you swear you’re all inseparable and that living together “only makes sense,” you’d be surprised to learn that you’re all likely not on the same page about things… unless there is clear communication between you and your roommates.
One of the easiest ways to keep up with regular communication is to schedule roommate meetings. These could be bi-weekly, monthly, or whatever time interval you all feel is appropriate. At roommate meetings, open and honest communication should be encouraged about home happenings and how everyone living under the roof of that unique rental home that accommodates six different people. Is someone not holding up their fair share of chores? Do you need to set some boundaries for the huge party that a couple of your roommates want to throw that’s a few weeks away? Talk about it here, and come to a compromise together as roommates. It’s one of the most effective ways to encourage communication.
Stay Up on Your Space Management Game
Your room is your room, and your roommates’ rooms are their rooms… but what about common areas? If you’ve gone in on a humongous house near campus with an equally spacious backyard with your four best friends, they’ll all be bringing their furniture and belongings. While you all can (and should) come to an agreement on which furniture stays and what needs to go back into storage in the basement, there’s still going to be clutter in the common areas.
One of the simplest ways to keep your shared living areas clean and everyone from pointing fingers at one another is to establish weekly cleaning schedules where you and your roommates take turns cleaning shared living areas and decluttering the space.
This also holds true for shared kitchens and bathrooms. These are probably the two biggest areas in a shared off-campus student home that can cause the most friction. Whether it’s stacks of dirty dishes from eons past piling up in the sink or half empty cosmetic bottles scattered amongst cluttered bathroom countertops, there’s the potential for things to get messy. Setting some ground rules with your roommates about expectations for surface areas within the home is the best way to avoid lingering resentment if you happen to be the one who ends up cleaning everything.
Come to a Compromise on Guests
Some people are the life of the party, and others prefer a much quieter living experience. While there’s nothing wrong with either of those lifestyles, there’s definitely the potential to butt heads if you’ve got roommates belonging to both factions living under the same roof. If you’re living in a popular four-bedroom student home right along Court Street, and you’ve got some incredibly extroverted roommates who want to throw a rager at least once a month, and you’re someone who detests the noise from parties, you’re going to need to come together as roommates and set guidelines for what can and can’t happen. Maybe the party needs to end by a certain time, or maybe you put a cap on the number of guests that can be in your home at any given time. Once again, communication is essential.
Embrace the Chaos
At the end of the day, living with a bunch of friends inside a huge student home that’s located right across the way from campus is going to be a little chaotic—it’s sort of unavoidable to a degree when you have that many personalities living under the same roof.
While it can at times be stressful and challenging to navigate, it gives you invaluable conflict management skills to use in adult relationships as you continue to get older. Plus, even if your roommates get on your nerves and maybe don’t always hold up to their fair share of chores around the home, you’ve got an incredibly vast social network just down the hall from your bedroom. Having a handful of roommates is great for when you want to go out and have a friend join you, or if you just need an ear to listen to you vent sometimes.