Tag Archives: living with roommates

Home

We Don’t Know: What Does it Mean to be a Good Roommate?

Leave a comment

I recently stumbled across the awesome How To Adult video below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNI1fWTlGwY

To sum up their seven tips for being a highly effective roommate:

Tip #1: Set the rules early on.

Tip #2: Have a monthly status meeting.

Tip #3: Be consistent.

Tip #4: Be generous.

Tip #5: Remember that this isn’t “your apartment.” It’s “your and your roommate’s apartment.”

Tip #6: Keep the lines of communication open.

Tip #7: Prepare in advance for possibly parting ways with your roommate.

I think these are awesome rules for living in peace with a non-related human being.  I’ve somewhat successfully lived in my four-bedroom house with a fairly consistent cast of characters for almost three years now, and I think Tip #6 is pretty much the savior of our lives.

But sometimes I wonder if being neat and tidy and nice and polite is good enough to be considered a “good roommate.”  Certainly it makes you an unobtrusive cohabitant.  But if cohabitant is really as far as the relationship goes: there’s no feeling of family or relationship.  So what exactly is the definition of good roommate?

The reason I wonder about this is probably borne from my own insecurity of being a bad roomie.  On a typical night, my fiancé and I come home from a long day at work and go straight upstairs to my bedroom, where I do some UE maintenance for a bit, he finishes up some remaining work, then I pass out without remembering to take out my contacts, and he plays video games for a couple hours before shutting off the light.

Other than occasionally running into my fellow house-dwellers in the kitchen or living room, my main interaction is the somewhat-daily photo that I spam them of our kitchen sink.  I call it the #NagPic, and they’re unusually nice about my insane neuroticism.  (In my defense, it’s incredibly effective at reminding people of their ice cream dish from 3 am last night, but I really don’t recommend it for households of not-incredibly-chill people.)

On the other side of the spectrum, UE writer Emily Knight used to live in this fabulous house where each roommate made dinner once per week and they all sat down and ate together.  This absolutely blows my mind.  How quaint!  How tight-knit!  How envy-inducing!  Just hearing about it inspired fantasies in my head of 1950s-esque hairdos and someone wearing a cute apron from Modcloth.  (I’m not even going to go into all the bike rides, pumpkin carving, and Christmas tree decorating that went on in that utopia of friendship.)

Admirable as it is, it’s just not feasible in my life.  Does that make me a bad roommate?  Probably not.  Does walking upstairs with no acknowledgement of my cohabitants other than “hey” make me a bad roommate?  Probably.  I think it depends on your definition.

While I’m still deciding whether I’m okay with my definition, what’s yours—and are you okay with it? Share your enlightenment in the comments.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Photo by Sara Slattery

Home

My Journey to Happy Cohabitation

Leave a comment

Finding the right living situation can feel like an endless Goldilocks and the Three Bears tale—there are a million ways a place can be a bad fit. On the path to my current peaceful shared living arrangement, I landed in a few of those not-so-great spots.      

Living with my Landlord’s Daughter

In my first experience renting a room after moving out of my hometown, one of my two housemates was the landlord’s daughter. My lady housemates were awesome, and I was excited to be living in Oakland, but I attuned to the local housing rates and, as I got to know some folks in town, they let me know my rent was a ripoff. The situation grew tense as I realized what a shoddy deal I was getting. It was time to move. Before too long, I found a much cheaper place just one street over with two bedrooms available. My best friend, who was also looking for a place, jumped on board.

Living with my Best Friend

I scoured the Internet for advice about whether or not moving in with a best friend would work. All the articles advised against it, but we forged ahead with our plans. We were both 22 and single, what could go wrong?

Then, two weeks before our move in date, my best friend met the man of her dreams (they’re now engaged). At our new place, our bedrooms shared two paper-thin walls and she didn’t like staying at his place. A few months down the line, he wound up moving in. This was not what I’d signed up for! It didn’t help that her new boyfriend and I weren’t politically aligned. It didn’t help that the two of them were better friends with our fourth housemate than I was. It didn’t help that I was renting the dinky shoebox sized room, while everyone else had more space. It didn’t help that her two cats bullied my cat so badly I eventually kept her in my room. It took our friendship some time to recover, and that was after the two of them moved out. But things have gotten better! After that, I lived alone—well, sort of.

Living at my Work

My boss, a small business owner, had rented an apartment to use as an office and was planning on renting the bedroom out to someone as a personal office. When I needed to move, she offered it to me. For a year, my housemates were my co-workers. I enjoyed the quiet evenings with the apartment to myself—a hint of the freedom of having my own place. Still, I found myself frequently escaping to my boyfriend’s place in the city. The long evening hours alone, though meditative, felt claustrophobic to me—far too easy to get lost in endless existential omphaloskepsis. The other challenge was the location of the apartment: Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, with a second story street-facing bedroom window. Outside my window there was a bench, a bus stop, and a restaurant that stayed open ‘til 2 am. As much as I love cities, I do not love the noise. And it was heartbreaking to live so intimately close to people living on the streets, some struggling with addiction and mental health issues. It wasn’t a situation I could, or would want to, get used to. After just shy of a year on Telegraph, I let my boss know I was planning to move out.

Living on Couches

My boyfriend and I moved out of our respective rooms thinking we’d move in together, and then decided not to take the plunge quite yet. He wound up moving back home with his parents to figure things out and I wound up searching for the perfect shared living situation, all the while cat sitting and couch surfing. Even though I enjoyed hanging out with peoples’ pets and seeing friends, those four months living out of a suitcase were stressful. It was humbling realizing just how far from being homeless I actually am.

Living in a Home with New Friends

After two and half months of combing Craigslist, synchronicity came to the rescue. A friend of mine from work let me know that a room in the five bedroom house she lived in (dubbed the Harmony Home), would be available in six weeks. I went and looked at the place and I felt like we clicked. I’d never lived with this many people, and the last time I’d lived with a group, it went terribly sour. But by this point I was sick of hopscotching around the Bay: it was time to take a risk.

There are many ways to co-habit, ranging from minimal contact to familial.  In previous shared living situations, we shared space, but we didn’t share a vision for the home. When I see others fully at ease, being themselves, I feel more comfortable. At Harmony Home we all want to live in a low-key, warm, and lively space. I cherish the cooking projects, the many guests, and the challenge of navigating conflict skillfully when it arises. I cherish the richness added by each housemate’s interests, humor, music, and conversation. I feel a part of something bigger than myself and my own bubble. As an added bonus, because there are so many of us we’re able to tackle big projects like planting a garden and setting up a grey water system.

I’m starting to feel at peace with the living situation challenges I’ve dealt with in the past. At Harmony Home, we do run into friction, but we’re all invested enough in co-creating a safe, positive space that we work through our conflicts swiftly. This home, with its all of its house plants, two cats, resident tarantula, and Mother Earth swag everywhere on everything, is where it’s at for me.

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

Photo by Andy Sutterfield

 

Home

Bad Bugs—I Mean Bed Bugs (A Survivor’s Tale)

Leave a comment

I’m not really wiggy about bugs. I’d really prefer if they stayed outside, truth be told, but should a wanderer mosey into the tub or a wiggly-iggly take a jaunt up the wall I’m usually pretty level-headed about it all. After all, spiders in the house are good luck, right? My point is, I’m hard pressed to find a bug story that really phases me, and the story I’m about to tell you is one that pushed me right past the precipice of my comfort zone.

The year was 2010 and I was living in a very old, very large Boston house with a slew of roommates. If this is anyone’s story, however, it is my housemate. My housemate treated his bedroom like a garage. It was a smattering of workout equipment, drum sets, tool boxes, pieces of wood, car tires, and rustic wooden furniture fit for a pirate. Complete with a cot on the floor.

My housemate’s room. See what I mean?

One day, My housemate’s sister moved home from Ohio and arrived at our house with a giant, fluffy, tempo/orthopedic mattress. The kind made for jumping on one side and balancing glasses of red wine simultaneously on the other. The universe had smiled down upon my housemate.

Soon though, my housemate and his girlfriend started to break out in welt-like, lumpy-type, mystery hives. Stress? New detergent? An accidental brush with an oak or ivy of the poisonous persuasion? Nobody knew. Not until one night Itchy and Scratchy, merely by chance, turned the lights on in the middle of the night to find, on their person—you guessed it—a bug from their bed. A bed bug.

See, Rachel forgot to mention that the mattress was stored in a damp outdoor garage for two months, and even though my housemate’s room looked like a garage… well, it was in fact not.

What came next was a frantic string of phone calls placed to our maintenance man, a scouring of the internet’s expansive knowledge on these things, the desperate, paranoid sympathy-itching (sympathitching?) that the rest of us felt, the removal of all of my housemate’s things to the curb, and an explosive argument about the lifestyle, breeding, and feeding habits of bed bugs.

Allow me to clear some things up for you:

  • Bed bugs cannot and will not live on you. You are not a bed and you go into the sunlight. This goes against their whole life philosophy.
  • They can live in clothes piles, couches, hidden spaces of wooden things, and floorboards. I know what I said in the last item, but you are still not any of these things and should not be concerned that they are on you. Your pet is also none of these things which means Whiskers and Fido are also in the clear.
  • Bed bugs are not known to transmit infectious agents or pathogens, and therefore the risk of them making you sick is extremely minimal. They can make you look like you’ve been beaten with a flail, though.

They are tough to get rid of, but here are some housemate-tested, results-based advice:

  • Discard all affected items. You might be tempted to wrap everything you own in plastic diaper-like packaging and then keep using it, but don’t be that guy. Take one for the team and throw everything you own away. And please, if you’re going to put your infested mattress on the street corner please label it as such to prevent some poor college kid from thinking they just scored themselves a swank new sleep slab.
  • Examine everything. Get some rubber gloves and go for a hunt. They are pretty gross though, so maybe do this one before you eat your lunch.
  • Sterilize. If you find any perpetrators, or if you have something you feel desperately attached to, spray it with rubbing alcohol. This will damage the bed bugs to death. Just the way you want them.
  • Heat. Wash all of your clothes in a hot wash cycle or boil them. Steam any upholstered furniture you can’t bear to part with.
  • Vacuum. Any place you steam will need to be vacuumed: this will remove any eggs, survivors, and (of course) carcasses of the bed bugs.
  • Exterminate. Have your exterminator and maintenance guy come and spray toxins all over the house. Have them explain to you that you do not have the receptors that are meant to be damaged by this spray. Google that information later just to be safe, and follow them around to make sure they really do spray everywhere and that they answer all of your questions. They will be happy you were there.
  • Sleep tight! Don’t let the … oh, never mind.

 

Photo by Meaghan Morrison

DIY, Home

Home (Theater) Improvement

1 Comment

“This is the end of life as we have come to know and love it.” I thought as I watched thirty five square feet and 1080 progressively scanned lines of glorious television walk out of my life forever. My roommate, along with his beloved projector, was headed for greener pastures, leaving the rest of us to languish away into sad, lonesome, standard-def obscurity.

The Projector

There’s a lot of good literature out there on the Googles that will help guide you to the perfect projector. Since we had become accustomed to a certain standard of television, we were looking for a 1080p projector, 60Hz would do, with a minimum contrast ratio of 1:2000. But In terms of what kinds of projectors are available on the market (from the $200 VewSanic knock-off to the $20,000 3DMax Sound-O-Vision Extreme), the price range we were expecting was between $500 and $1000. But for us our wallets, we were just looking for something to “scrape by.” So, when we found an $800 projector that hit our minimum requirements, but was available for $580 through a special refurbished program, we jumped at it. BOOM. And we had a projector again.

Everything was hooked up to the cable and DVR—we turned it on and… there’s no sound. Maybe we should have thought this out better. With a trip to RadioShack for a ⅛” stereo to ¼” mono adapter, we were able to jury rig my fiancée Meggyn’s bass amp in as a temporary sound system. Well, at least it was loud and thumpy!

The Mount

Bliss settled in, until we realized we were merely maintaining the status quo. Like cavemen watching the firelight flicker across the wall. With the projector haphazardly settled on an end-table with a book underneath to prop it up, the risk of inebriated guests leaving open-topped drinks on the same table and toppling them into the delicate internals—the horror, the horror!—was just too high. Of course, I’d just dropped an inordinate sum of money on a brand new projector, so I wasn’t keen on the idea of dropping even more moolah on a television mount that wouldn’t directly affect the viewing experience.

One of the nice things about living in a leased house is that you never know what surprises you might find! After hunting around for extra shelving, I came across an old television mount up in the back corner of the garage (the kind for those tube TVs that could smash toddlers to atoms). And so began the next obstacle: the mount was bolted into a high wooden rafter in the garage, but we only had drywall in the living room… To Google! It turns out that as long as there’s a stud behind wherever you’re screwing in the mount, it should hold weight. After a trip to the local Ace hardware to buy some screws that could be used to drill to China and a quick download of the Bubble Level app—to make sure we weren’t setting ourselves up for a neck kink—we got to work. (Contrary to Meggyn’s expectations, the level app did a good job!)

And then failure struck—we broke two of the screws because we thought we could get away without drilling pilot holes. It’s TOOL TIME! We borrowed a drill (thanks, mom!), and we raised the projector up like the Mennonites raising a barn. Then we cracked open a few beers to celebrate exactly like the Mennonites would not have.

The Connections

Now we were getting somewhere! We could no longer inadvertently destroy all of our wonderful video goodness without some extra effort of lobbing liquids towards the ceiling. The next failure, of course, being that we couldn’t actually connect the cable or the power to our ascended projector. Who wanted to get lost in the details of connecting this, right? What are we, rocket surgeons?

To solve our connection problems, I repurposed some unused bookshelves I had bought for my room. With a few more marks and holes in the wall next to the projector mount, I added a shelf in the living room that we loaded up with every bit of television-related electronics. To paint the picture for you, we now had the projector on the old TV mount (in the dead-center of the wall), an overburdened shelf stacked with enough boxes with blinking lights that it may have been flagged by the NSA, a bass amp on the floor, and so many power cables and audio/video cables strewn about that they might as well have been vines in a nightmarish Lovecraftian dystopian future of cybertronic Amazonian forest… Let’s leave it at “messier than a dorm room during finals” and be done. But now that everything worked, I was at: “Please, for the love of God and all that is holy (and not blinking lights at me), let me be done.”

The Organization

Now we had a beautiful 1080p picture taking up the front wall and plenty of loud thumpy sounds to accompany it. Except if you changed the input from the cable to the Wii. Or to the Chromecast. Or to the Xbox. Was I the only one around here who understood which colors get connected to which inputs on the back of this thing?! Rather than attempting to teach every person who came to the house which cables to disconnect/reconnect to switch the audio whenever you switched the video feed (I just wasn’t up for writing the Connectionist Manifesto), I decided that another trip to RadioShack was in order. There I found an A/V switch for under $20 along with a few new A/V cables and a shiny new sound bar with subwoofer for definitely not under $20 (Meggyn was complaining about wanting her bass amp back and, hey, it was payday!). I returned to our humble, if electrically dangerous, abode armed with my new equipment, a sharpie, some wire ties, some labels, and as much determination as I could muster. I tackled the monumental task of improving our sound system, organizing our A/V shelf, wire managing all of the dangly bits (can’t leave any extra 1s or 0s), and setting our theater system up in such a way that at the press of a (CLEARLY LABELLED) button, my roomies, or any of our guests, could switch between video and audio streams at will.

The Finishing Touches

Life almost seemed perfect. It was simple enough to use the newly organized system, the new sound system was much more balanced than a 15 Watt bass amp, and whatever we watched was beautiful (except the Wii… stupid standard-definition output). But if you can’t find a problem to fix, then you aren’t looking hard enough. Some of the darker colors were being washed together by the projector, and it was sometimes hard to tell what was going on during scenes that took place in the dark. Blackout curtains became the next addition to the room. We got these thanks to a generous donation of leftover fabric from Meggyn’s mom. They just barely cover the full width of our window, but it works. Now, we can watch the projector during the day as if it were the middle of the night (without that pesky bedtime thing). Our last improvement was to go to OSH and buy some cinder blocks, push the couch forward so that it was closer to the wall (or rather, the screen), drop the cinder blocks behind the old couch and ADD ANOTHER  COUCH. Because couch. Now, we’ve got theater-style seating to go with our home-theater!

I still don’t think we’re done making improvements, but for the moment we’re pretty happy with how everything turned out. And the only really spendy parts were the projector itself and the sound bar—things which will be following us to our next house! Thanks to some successful craigslist foraging, the new couch was free, and the cinder blocks we used to prop it up were a few dollars apiece. We used five blocks for the couch and another three to make a recycled-plywood footrest.

All-in-all, we could have done a much worse (much more expensive) job of converting our living room into one radical home theater.

Photo by Michael Cox

Photo by Michael Cox

Relationships, Sex

I Had Casual Sex With My Roommate

Leave a comment

There was a brief period in college where I was having what might have been seen as a sordid affair with a good friend. It was great. We were part of a big group of people who all worked together, and were all attached at the hip. Weekend trips to the beach, late night drunken karaoke sessions. I would find myself belting the lyrics of Moulin Rouge’s most soulful duet from the sunroof of a car with an Oreo shake from Jack in the Box in my hand and my friends leaning out the windows singing backup. And, as if eating poorly and consuming trash media weren’t enough, I decided to add what would eventually become an emotionally disastrous relationship to the mix.

I honestly don’t even really remember how it started, but a few nights a week the two of us would find ourselves alone, in one of our rooms, and things would get steamier from there. At first, it was fabulous. The best part about this “affair” was that it was so casual. There was literally nothing beyond hooking up, and after the terrible breakup I had just gone through it was such a relief to have something easy with a friend I trusted so much. There wasn’t any interest in dating, so we could dispense with the awkward so-what’s-your-middle-name conversations. Hell, we already knew all those things about each other.

Come spring quarter, our entire group was moving off-campus and we were all deciding where to live. A piece of our little group organized itself and signed a lease on a fantastic party house off the main drag and got excited about a whole year of playing and dancing and late-night heart-to-hearts. This friend and I, still in the midst of our precarious relationship, found ourselves staring down a twelve-month lease. But we trusted each other, and were really enjoying our rendezvous. Wouldn’t it have been smart to take it a little easy once that lease was signed?

Because, as it does, the other shoe dropped on me. My friend-with-benefits met and fell in love with someone. Which, under any normal circumstances, I would have been absolutely thrilled about. In fact, I was thrilled, except for two tiny details, which ended up having not-so-wonderful effects. First, I was not actually told that things had changed in our arrangement until things were already underway with this other girl (which made me feel not totally valuable and as if I was being kept on the line just in case). Second, I didn’t get to choose. I felt like I was being broken up with when the whole point was that we weren’t dating. Oh, and bonus: she had the same name as me.

I must say, I may not have handled this situation perfectly. My entire feeling was, essentially, “Who the fuck are you to go and date someone else with the same goddamn name?” Really helpful, trust me. But I felt like I had been blown off. It is not very productive to dwell on feeling worthless. And then to have to spend months listening to her moan from their room (oh, the thin walls), and watch their stupid fights… I wasn’t envious of their relationship, I just hated having been rejected. I hated that I was second string. I hated that I was the one who didn’t get to decide when it was over (control freak, much?). I never said anything about this to any of my friends, benefits or otherwise, because our relationship was never more than physical: I never felt like it was my place to explore what had happened. I think things would have been better off if I had allowed myself the space to really work things out. Instead, I stayed angry for the entire year.

This wasn’t jealousy. By then, I was dating someone else, but unfortunately I’m not exactly the type to let bygones be bygones. Tiny forgivable offenses like not cleaning up the dishes turned into character flaws and major issues. I was hypersensitive about everything, and I played a major part in dividing the house. Because we were living together, there was no space to cool off, no opportunities to stop picking at the wound. Our friendship never really recovered.

All in all, the actual sexy-times part of this lasted about a month, maybe, but the effects were long-lasting: four years out, I don’t really keep in contact with this friend even though I am still very close with my other roommates.  I really regret not maintaining that friendship, and the fallout from our not-actual-break-up-break-up. In the moment, there were really no downsides. We knew each other well, trusted one another, and could have a really good time. It was exciting and fun and we could ignore all the cliffs we were skirting. Until, of course, we teetered over the edge. Afterwards, it was all downsides. Awkwardness, uncomfortable feelings within our friend group, heightened tensions around quotidian issues.

Would I do it again? Probably. But this time around I would add a little more sunlight into the equation, and work harder to make things less awkward once it was all over. I would let go of my pride, and be open about how I was feeling. And maybe not sign a lease together.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Relationships

Avoiding Roommate Drama

1 Comment

The joys and follies of living with roommates are many and varied. On one hand, you have things like cheaper rent, people to always hang out with, and new friendships that can last a lifetime. On the flipside, you may have to put up with things like less parking, less time to sleep in before work if you want to take a shower, and a daily morning obstacle course of your roommate’s passed-out friends from partying the night before. Whether for better or worse, many of us have to live with roommates at least once in our lifetime. In this article, I’m going to give you a set of guidelines that have helped me resolve issues that otherwise could have resulted in a huge headache for everybody involved.

Imagine something that your roommate does to annoy you. It might be something in the spectrum of forgetting to turn off the TV or rarely doing dishes. No matter what the issue is, the next time you get mad, rather than charging in and confronting them about it, I want you to stop and ask yourself the first of several questions:

Does it happen regularly? The answer to this may dictate the future of your relationship. If the answer is “no,” I suggest you drop the issue and give your roommate the benefit of the doubt that they made an honest mistake. If the answer is “yes,” then move on to the next question.

Is it something I can fix on my own? I find that, more often than not, the thing that is annoying you can be completely overcome by doing a little creative critical thinking. For example, if the house is messy, maybe you need to create a new system of cleaning or hire a once-a-month cleaning service. No matter what your problem is, put a bit of constructive thought into solving the problem. If after wracking your brain for a peaceful solution is unsuccessful, you may ask yourself the next question.

Am I willing to move out if this problem is not solved? The answer to this question puts the importance of your dilemma to the test. If you are not bothered enough by the situation dedicate the effort to finding a new home (while likely burn bridges in the process), you should probably take a deep breath and let it slide. If you find that the issue is so unbearable that you can’t possibly live with it any longer, move on to the next final question.

Will my roommate be open and receptive to a conversation or does he/she get defensive? Now, you are going to have to make a real judgment call. You must ask yourself if your roommate is someone who takes criticism easily and makes an honest effort to change, or if he/she is someone who will likely scoff in your direction and try to bother you even more or shut down and give you the silent treatment. The reason this step is so delicate is that people tend to attach to their behaviors: no matter how persuasive you are in telling them that their behavior may not be acceptable to everyone, they may take the constructive criticism with a dosage of contempt. Some people are good at brushing it off, while others may take it to heart, depending on how much they value the actions in question.

Discussing the Situation

If you decide that you cannot live with your roommate’s behavior but a discussion is not worth the risk, I suggest you begin looking for a new place to live and try to end things on a good note. However, if you can, try to approach your roommate politely and diplomatically so that you can work on solving your predicament together. Be prepared with a couple of solutions to suggest. If you and your roommate decide that you need some help selecting the appropriate solution, consider involving an impartial third party to help act as a mediator.

Living with people can strengthen relationships or break bonds, and the way that you approach the hurdles you encounter will impact the quality of your relationships for the rest of your life.

Photo by Sara Slattery