5 Personalities You Come Across While Flat Sharing

Ever lived with a housemate that you weren’t sure existed?

So, you’re moving. Fun! You’ve found a nice-looking house on one of the nation’s well-known flat-sharing websites. You’ve done an inspection, you’ve put your best foot forward and made a good first impression. The house fits the criteria: it’s in a good spot, close to public transport and a few good bars. Your new roomies seem normal; one works in real-estate and the other is a software engineer. Seems harmless. But take it from someone who knows. You never really know who you’re going to be living with from one fifteen minute inspection. Give it a few weeks of peaceful domestic routine to find out if you’re living with one of the five trademark flatsharing personalities.

The Obsessive Compulsive
Someone who ultimately, is not designed for shared living situations. They’ve found their domestic groove and they’ll be damned if anyone is going to wedge them out. From polite text-reminders (or worse, post-it notes) about water on the bathroom floor, to heavy restrictions on what household belongings you can keep in the living room (oh, that’s your vase? It’s fine, it just doesn’t go with the rug…)

Shop the look

Broad City, Comedy Central, 2016

The Party Animal
These guys are having the time of their lives, and everyone ought to know about it. You might occasionally hear them stumble in at 3am, or find them curled up at the front door the next morning sans-key and phone. They’re not exclusively loud though; these are the people who might disappear for days on end, only to appear one Tuesday morning in a good mood (with the hangover yet to hit). You’ve met most of their friends — but they’ve never been in a state to remember.

The Um, Thief
It starts out slow — one day you’ll notice that someone’s taken your avocado. You put it down to a mistake (hey, one avocado looks the same as any other, right?). Then you’ll notice a bag of chips has been raided from the pantry, your conditioner starts evaporating from the bottle, or your toothpaste vanishes. One of two things will occur with these types: muttered/quiet denial of guilt, or a mortified apology, describing how they had NO idea it was yours, or that they just desperately needed it and meant to replace it but then they got a call from their mum’s-best friend’s-hairdresser’s-dog and just totally forgot.

The Ghost
So like, the rent gets paid, they have food in the fridge and clothes on the line, and their car is out front, but aside from that, there are no signs of life. You’ve never seen their bedroom door open, and one time you thought you heard them walking down the hall, only to peer around the corner to a seemingly empty space. In the past six months of living there, you’ve had about seven confirmed sightings. They seemed real enough at the inspection, but now you’re wondering if you’ve stumbled into the latest episode of a ghost Netflix special.

The Gem
If you ever get a chance to live with this most rare of housemates, keep them around for as long as you can. These types have shared living down to a fine art. Balancing being around for a chat, but also just doing their own thing, from taking the bins out whenever it’s their turn to replacing the toilet paper. They’re just all-round good blokes, the Goldilocks of house-sharing — not too much, not too little, but just right.