For students moving away from home in the next few weeks, flatshares are inescapable: fun when they work – hellish when they go wrong. Data company Locatable has teamed up with housing campaigners Generation Rent to produce The Housemates' Guide to Happiness, a contract for co-tenants, and are working on an app to simplify one common flashpoint: bill sharing.
Locatable highlights money issues as a key source of disputes. "When living with people for the first time, whether it's your best friend since childhood, or a complete stranger … money can become a nasty issue if not dealt with openly and proactively." The organisation suggests that each flatmate accepts responsibility for one utility each.
So, when should visiting partners contribute to bills? An ex-flatmate's boyfriend moved in to one of my shared homes permanently without permission, refused to chip in, then suggested we should buy contents insurance in case his expensive stereo was taken in a burglary. If only we'd had the Locatable guide to hand: "If people become regulars then it might make sense to have a conversation about contributing towards the cost of common items. Our research found that once guests start staying more than a couple of times a weeks without chipping in, you run the risk of compromising your chirpy home."
When you have co-tenants who believe housework is done in the dead of night by kindly elves, a cleaning clause is essential. "Agree on a rota for taking the rubbish/recycling out, mopping and vacuuming common areas." One memorable housemate of mine vomited on the landing and then hid the result under a suitcase. Cleaning rotas prevent melodramas and vertiginous stacks of mouldy cups.
Another clause promotes respect for other people's belongings ("do not steal my pasta – I really need that pasta – I can't afford to keep us both in pasta"), as well as highlighting antisocial noise and what are coyly termed "lifestyle differences." I once encountered four French jugglers in my kitchen. My flatmate insisted she had only slept with two of them.
Other sub-clauses you might want to add to the "lifestyle differences" section could include banning sex when it's so loud that eavesdroppers are tempted to award marks out 10 when, if ever, the lovers emerge. This would have been handy for the woman in her 30s I lived with who enjoyed raucous couplings with her hoodie-wearing boyfriend but left the bedroom door open. We didn't have a contract or an app, so I reached in and shut the door. She never spoke to me again.
I wonder which rules would have discouraged the flatmate who kept her front door key on a large leather fob (with her name and address printed on it) from losing it (yoo-hoo: burglars!). Or is it possible to legislate for the clumsy flatmate who smashed all my crockery – the only crockery we had – and simply laughed?
A contract is an excellent suggestion and my own additional rules are: do not allow strangers to stay in an absent flatmate's bed, especially if they're likely to urinate in it. And do not cook liver curry if you're likely to leave it festering in the kitchen for days. No app is capable of dealing with that.
