How to Survive Living with a Messy Roommate

Posted on 30/04/2018

Getting Along With Your Roommate

Cleaning can be difficult, especially when you have a less than helpful roommate to help you with the house cleaning. It can be a little frustrating cleaning up after someone who won’t clean up after him/herself and doing all the work yourself. Let’s face it - some people just aren’t natural born cleaners but there are a multitude of things you can do in order to help keep the household chores from piling up by the end of each week.


Delegating Cleaning Tasks

The first of these things is to create a list of daily (or weekly) house cleaning chores that need to be done. Try to make sure that the list of delegations is evenly spread out between the two of you. You don’t want your roommate thinking that you secretly gave him or her more things to do than you gave yourself (even though we know you would really like to). If this seems like too much in the beginning, take a step back: instead of spreading the cleaning out evenly, delegate one to two jobs to your roommate and see how well they perform the tasks. If that works, slowly add one task every week or every other week until the jobs are evenly spread among you and your roommate.


Solving the Deep Cleaning Issue

Deep cleaning can be a serious problem, especially when you have a roommate who cleans but doesn’t enjoy deep cleaning. Home cleaning can be time and energy consuming and so it is easy for one person to want their roommate to do the cleaning. One way to alleviate this issue is to involve your roommate in the cleaning process. Make domestic cleaning a fun task. For example, playing music and singing out loud while cleaning takes the edge off of constantly reminding you and your roommate that you are in the middle of a deep cleaning process (although you may want to make sure that your neighbours around you are not home at the time). Another idea is to set a day where you know that both you and your roommate will be home and you can designate that day as your deep clean day. The last thing you can try is to switch back and forth between who does the deep cleaning for that week or month: you can start off by doing it and then delegate the tasks to your roommate the next week or month.


Hire Cleaning Services

The last option is not the most financially beneficial, but it can help you when it comes to having a roommate who doesn’t clean at all. There are many cleaning companies who will come into your place and clean for you. The best part about this is that, if you want to, for the most part you don’t have to clean, for the cleaning company you hire will do that for you. What’s even better is that if you hire them on a regular basis, the company will provide you with a discounted price.


Talk it out

The last thing you can resort to is asking your roommate why he or she will not clean. Sometimes, people who despise cleaning are those people who learned to not enjoy cleaning because of past experiences, such as parents always demanding that they keep their room clean. In some cases, you can have a breakthrough with your roommate and help them understand that they are an important part in helping to keep your house clean.