I have stressed in other blog posts the importance of establishing standards and sharing your expectations with your roommates when you first move in together. Everyone comes from different living situations, so “normal” is different for everyone. That is all okay, but you need to talk about it with your roommates so you don’t breed tension and hurt feelings to the point of not being friends with your roommates.
When you are having this discussion with your roommates, I recommend asking everyone these questions and really listening to each person’s thoughts on these in a non-judgmental way. Then when you have discussed all of these, you can create a set of standards that you will all live by.
Here are the questions to ask yourself and your new roommate(s) in this discussion:
- When do you typically go to sleep?
- When do you typically wake up?
- What do you plan to do with your free time?
- Do you have any allergies? If so, what are you allergic to? Is there anything I can do as your roommate to make you more comfortable regarding your allergies?
- What have you done in the past when it comes to dishes? Wash by hand or with dishwasher? Have you put dirty dishes in the sink, and for how long? Do you wash dishes immediately or can you leave them for 24 hours? Should we wash pots/pans quicker than plates/bowls since we have fewer pots/pans and everyone needs those in order to make food?
- What does “clean” mean to you? What are some of the cleanliness standards you have lived by in the past?
- How often do you think the carpet needs to be vacuumed?
- How often do you think the toilets need to be cleaned deeply?
- How often will we take the trash out? How full will be let the trash can get? If it gets too full it becomes more difficult to take it out, which usually means no one will take it out and it’ll get even more over-filled and stinky.
- What should be our system to make sure we are all doing our part when it comes to chores? Keeping in mind that we won’t all be present to see chores be done most of the time.
- When it comes to grocery shopping, do you typically plan a day or two in advance of when you’ll go shopping or do you go impulsively? Should we try to let each other know when we plan to go, so we can go together?
- When we inevitably get on each others’ nerves or we think someone isn’t keeping up these standards we set, how would you want to be told that someone thinks you aren’t following the standards? Usually avoiding passive aggressive sticky notes is a good idea. Would you prefer to be told in person? One-on-one? In a group discussion? Over text message? You should stress that everyone is human and once we get busy it can be easy to forget some of the standards and not realize that you may be rubbing someone the wrong way. People make mistakes. And confronting these mistakes early on is important so you don’t start resenting each other for not correcting the mistakes. A person cannot correct their mistakes if they haven’t been told that they are making the mistakes. These conversations should always come from a place of kindness.
- Do we want to start any traditions for our apartment?
- Who in the apartment has a vehicle here with them? Are you willing to give people without vehicles rides occasionally? How should we go about paying for gas money, or will we pay each other for gas money?
- What are some of the top things on your DCP bucket list?
- Do we want to start a group chat? If so, what kinds of things should be done in the group chat? Just informational messages and letting people know when you plan to go grocery shopping? Making fun plans? Sending memes? You could have 2 group chats, one for informational messages and one for more fun messages.
- Do we want to have a key-hook where we all keep our keys when we are in the apartment so we know who is home at any given time?
- Do we want to have a calendar where we put our work schedules so we can know who will be home and so we know when we can visit each other at work?
- How do we want to go about having visitors to the apartment? Should we tell each other? How will we tell each other? How much advanced notice should we provide, if any? Are we okay with overnight guests in certain circumstances?
I hope this gave you ideas on how to lead a discussion on roommate expectations during your Disney College Program (or just in general). Having a comfortable home life is essential to your happiness, and having standards to live by will make that easier, even though this discussion can be difficult. Best of luck!