How to Keep the Apartment Clean Without One Roommate Doing Everything

By Ashley Paskill

Living with roommates is a fun experience, especially if it is your first time. You are learning how to live independently away from your family. One of the biggest things to learn to do is to keep your apartment clean without leaving all the work for one person to do. Thankfully, there are ways to make sure each roommate has a fair share of the cleaning, so things get done fairly.

Make a schedule

At the start of each week, make a list of cleaning chores that need to get done and decide who is going to do each chore that week. Alternate who does each chore from week to week to keep it fair, and no one gets the easy tasks each week while someone else always gets the difficult tasks. The schedule can be on a calendar, or you can use a kids’ chore chart. If you are crafty, you may even decide to make your own.

Roommate agreement

Before moving in, meet up with your roommates to create a roommate agreement. This should include things such as paying rent, schedules, and other agreed-upon rules. Include a section on how cleaning tasks get done. Include rules such as “if you cook with it, you clean it.” Be as specific as possible to avoid any confusion and potential for disagreements or loopholes. If there are any disputes, you can refer back to your roommate agreement and show the rules that everyone agreed on and signed.

Avoid doing it by yourself

If your roommate is having a difficult week, it may be tempting to decide to do all of their cleaning chores for them and hope that they will reciprocate if you are having a stressful week. However, this usually backfires. At minimum, you may never get the kind deed reciprocated. At the worst, your roommate may try to take advantage of your kindness by saying that they are having a stressful week, even if they are not, just to get out of cleaning. You may switch their more difficult tasks for your easier tasks, but everyone should be contributing to chores each week.

Use an app

Nowadays, there is an app for everything. This includes apps for roommate chore help. These apps make chores fun by making them competitive and rewarding you for completing your cleaning tasks. You can add your roommates and cleaning tasks, and the app will assign the chores to the roommates. This makes it fair and unbiased as the app is deciding who does what.

Different definitions of clean

No matter how much you and your roommate agree on things, you will likely still have differences. One of these differences may be in what each of you thinks is clean. You may like everything to be in its place, while your roommate is okay with leaving things sitting out on the counters or the floor. Have a conversation with your roommate as soon as this issue arises and try to understand where they are coming from. If they tend to leave things lying around, see if they will be willing to contain this in their own space and respect shared spaces.

Effective communication

Communicating effectively about what cleaning needs to be done and what your expectations are is essential. Being passive-aggressive and leaving sticky notes around the apartment will not get you anywhere. This will only leave your roommate feeling bitter and unmotivated to make a change. Communicate your wants and needs early on and make sure you and your roommate are on the same page when it comes to cleaning. This will decrease stress and arguments moving forward.

Roommate check-ins

At least once a week, have a check-in with your roommate. This will allow you to see how you both feel about the cleaning tasks you are doing and what needs to be adjusted. During this time, bring up any differences in cleanliness ideas that you notice and brainstorm how to navigate moving forward. Try your best to remain calm during these conversations, even if something is upsetting you. This way, issues can be resolved in a friendly manner, and your roommate will not feel like they are being cornered.

In-between tidying

Even if you have a set day or a couple of days devoted to cleaning, you will likely still have small tidying tasks to do daily. This includes putting dishes away and taking the trash out. Make it a rule that everyone needs to clean up after themselves if they take things out and put their dishes in the dishwasher after dinner. Setting these boundaries ensures that everyone is doing their part and no one is tasked with doing so much at once. This also ensures that the cleaning tasks you have set are not built up and super difficult, since things are being done in the interim.

Keeping your apartment clean with a roommate can be difficult, especially when it comes to sharing the load, but it is possible to work together to share the task of cleaning.