Mumsnet Talk

My boyfriend and I are looking at moving in together later this year or early next year. But we can only afford to share with other people. Is this really as bad as I imagine it to me? Parties every weekend, sharing a kitchen and bathroom, people making loads of noise when I'm trying to sleep - is this how it is??

Oooooo, let me think back:

Aaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhhhhhhh!!

Nightmare. Other people using all of your shower gel, eating your food, bringing home various drunken mochican'd men to sleep on your carpet so when you open the lounge door in the morning you smacked them in the head with it and they blame you, taking the batteries out of the tv remote in your room, lending your stuff to people, not paying rent, playing loud music half of the night, phlegming into cups like it's not a big deal, letting a dog eat my stuff...

<takes deep breathe>

These were all mid 20 types.

Maybe an arrangement between adults would be okay but it's not something I'd do again.



I haven't helped you at all have I?

By the way, I have nothing against mohican'd men.

I love a naice mohican.

Just not the strange man on my carpet behind a door who's still comatose from the previous evening's activities.

'Tis annoying.

I loved living with housemates. Apart from the time one of them came back with a woman thirty years older than him. Who broke our futon. Not from sitting on it.

Outed myself there but OP, choose wisely and agree ground rules!

Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

DP and I shared for most of our twenties, with friends - and even that was a nightmare. I mean, it's nice sometimes, it's sociable, but then you just want to curl up on the sofa and watch a film but someone else wants to watch the football, and someone else is cooking with the music too loud, and you can't find any clean pans to make your popcorn, and you're desperately trying not to mention the fact that one housemate falls asleep with whatever DVD he is watching still playing so you get woken up at 3am with the 30-second repeat of the the theme tune that plays over the title menu...

It's really not much fun as a couple.

Plus, the one time we had someone living with us who we found through an advert, a 30-something with a good job who seemed to fit in really well with everyone else, we had to get him sectioned after he moved all the furniture into the back garden, threatened to beat up everyone at the neighbours' kid's birthday party, and then told me and DP he wanted to sleep at the end of our bed...

He really was lovely, but it put me off sharing with people I don't know well as you don't know how to cope when something goes seriously wrong because you don't know their history, friends or family and don't know how to get help

I think the only thing worse than sharing won housemates is being a couple and sharing with housemates. I'd rather live seperately.

I lived in a student house with very clean people. I think we only had two house parties the two years we lived there, although they did all like smoking weed which used to irritate me! I'm sure when you went to look round that kind of thing would be obvious!

After that me and DP moved in with his friends. 7 of us in a 5 person house was pretty minging to be honest! We had suchgood fun tthough it was worth it we hadn't lived together before so it was a nice gentle introduction. We could spend time with other people as well and it was less intense. I miss living like that!

Friend has just gone to do his masters in another city. He answered an advert online and his housemates are v.clean and the flats lovely. They are professionals in their late 20's though!

HATED IT. I only had 6 flatmates in 12 years who weren't either passive-aggressive fucks, or completely unhinged. TBF, I wasn't a bunch of flowers to live with, either.

If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't pussyfoot around any issues; not saying anything about things that annoy you just causes built-up resentment and I'd trust my instincts when fielding potential houseshares.

I've lived with 14 other people.

Out of that, I have enjoyed 6. 2 were the most spiteful cows I've ever met (sorry!), 2 were just plain strange. The rest I could either take or leave..

I suggest setting up a cleaning rota very quickly, and keeping things clean as you go along so you'll never have to do a big clean.

Suggest a kitty for cleaning materials and that.

Keep expensive and nice shower gel and food under lock and key in your room. Don't keep anything you don't wanted knicked in a place where it can be knicked. Get a lock fitted on your bedroom.

Keep spares of stuff like UHT milk, sanpro, condoms, loo roll etc away so that if someone uses it all up, you aren't caught short.

Tell people asap when things bother you, don't leave them to stew away and get worse.

Don't rely on Sky + to record things (if you have it). Accept early on that BBC iplayer and 4OD will become your new friends.

The worst things I have had to cope with are used sanpro being left in the bathroom bin uncovered, mouldy/rotten food in the fridge, flatmates who do "odd" things e.g. stealing the kitchen table as a new desk or cooking stir fry at 2am, flatmates who don't clean the loo.. I did encounter my ex flatmate shagging in the kitchen in broad daylight .. My friend and her DP share as a couple and I think the only problem was that they have a lot of loud and long nookie, but that's nothing unusual and not too too bad.

A friend living in halls discovered that her neighbour had taken a shit, and baked it in the oven, but thankfully that sort of horror seems to be confined to halls ..

My housemate's weekend guest shat in his sleep. While sleeping on the settee. Obviously he was embarassed etc, so he turned the cushions over.....and it was my week to clean. Not good.

Living in shared houses is brilliant fun.
The niggles are worth it.
The main thing is to make sure everyone pays their way.
And always sniff the teatowel before you use it (my abiding memory is smelly teatowels as no one took the responsibility to wash them).

Haha very small squeak just laughed out loud. Tea towels always smelt revolting in our house! They could be used for mopping up identifiable spills, then for drying dishes without anyone caring! <vom>

I house shared Aged 19 to 28. It was a mixed bag. Im still friends with some of them now.

House sharing has its disadvantages. I've had my share of skanky housemates. It enabled (now) dh & I to save more towards our own house.

I don't 'get' all these younguns at my work paying a fortune to rent a city centre shoebox with a friend. House sharing is the financially sound choice.

Dh & I shared for 18m ish before we moved into our own house. We never fancied paying £600+ for a 1 bed flat when we could pay much less for 2 rooms in a house share. We rented the big & small rooms then used the small room as our tv room/ dh's office. By that time we were living with non-skanks and 3 out of 4 of us in the house usually cleaned. We had 2 fridges which made life easier.

It was better as often house shares include the dps of the house mates and in a 4 bed house you can end up with 8 people there which had been known to happen.

You need to find some reasonably mature types. If the house is clean when you look round (& when you pop back unannounced!) then its a good sign.

See what I'm thinking is, keeping everything of "ours" in our room until we need it. Toiletries, tea towels, pots pans etc. Or is that just odd?

No, that's a good idea - but you need to choose the house carefully.

If you try to move into a house as a group of people, you'll end up with an atmosphere of 'yay, shared house, shared everything, woo!'.

But you could also look for adverts for 'a room in a shared house' where several strangers have got together and there are locks on all the doors. The downside is these people aren't your mates and you'd only be able to get to know them over a quick meeting before you decided to move in. But, the upside is, it's a much more private arrangement. DH and I did this for a while. It worked ok. It's much, much easier to be businesslike with strangers than mates.

Sharing with a load of party-going undergraduates, or people in their early 20s who're all single, is totally different from sharing with busy people. My mate shares with a couple of blokes who're doing law conversion courses. They have no time to be messy or noisy or anything!

DH and I house shared for a few months with friends, it meant we saved money to get married. I have lived in three house shares. One was awful due to drunken antics of one of my housemates. Another housemate was a spoilt brat, who was ungrateful. Overall I would sat all okay but gave up house sharing at age 30.

We did it a couple of years ago - hated it. It was very much 'her' house, and neither of us really felt comfortable in it. There was constant battles over the heating. She would complain that it was cold, but would only have the heating on for ONE HOUR day. In a large house with no double-glazing etc. As soon as she left for work in the morning, I'd put it on for four hours if I had the day off.

She is a lovely person, but I can't see us ever house-sharing with her again.

I've houseshared and so has DH. I would do it again, I'd also cheerfully have a lodger if we lived somewhere bigger.
However, I think you need to choose your housemates carefully and make sure you have certain groundrules in place before moving in together.

It turns very quickly into a doss house. Fun sometimes though.