Tips for moving in Together
When you’ve finally found the perfect person, living with a roommate can be the best! Sharing a space with your best friend or loved one is great because you know you’ll always have your favourite person around for all the best activities: Cooking meals, watching Netflix, sharing clothes etc. Living with a roommate can really help financially, as well as can be super rewarding, but a great living situation doesn’t always get a fighting chance.
The first few steps of moving with with someone are crucial to the success of your living arrangement. If you are having problems from the start, chances are the relationship with your new flat-mate isn’t going to improve.
To make sure you get off on the right foot here is You Move Me Vancouver Island’s tips for moving in together:
1. Make Sure it’s Going to be a Good Fit
Moving in with your best friend makes all kinds of sense; you are super close, you tell each other everything and you LOVE spending time together. But just because you get mistaken for siblings and laugh at all the same jokes does not spell success for living together. It is important to gauge your prospective roommate’s habits and lifestyle before taking the plunge. Some things to consider are:
- Do you share similar levels of tidiness?
- Are either of you the type of person to have friends over a lot? Will that be a problem for the other roommate?
- How often are either of you home typically? Will one person feel more responsible for the space, while the other might seem neglectful?
- What are your working hours like? Is one of you a night owl and the other a morning person?
These are just some of the really important questions to go over with your prospective roomie. Have a discussion about what would be a dealbreaker for either of you, because if your needs don’t align it will be very difficult to make things work.
2. Purge Together
An awesome byproduct of moving in with someone else is the chance to downsize your stuff. Between the two (or more) of you, the household will having everything it needs! But how do you decide which of your couches to keep? The new home may only have room for one person’s furniture, which may cause some tension. Our suggestion is to decide together. Think strategically with your new roommate to decide on the aesthetic, and practicality of each of your items before moving into your new shared space. By doing this in advance you will save on moving fees and be able to collectively decide on how your new home will look. If both of you have an input, and come to a decision together, it will feel like more of a spared space.
If you don’t want to part with your furniture, or are having trouble deciding, you can always move your things into storage. That way you know you’ll have those items in case you find your perfect new roommate isn’t what you were expecting and find yourself looking for a new place to live!
3. Compromise
By the time you’ve lived with someone for long enough, you will inevitably get into a disagreement. Fights are a completely normal feature of living with another person, because despite being ESSENTIALLY the same person, you’re actually NOT the same person. Our best piece of advice is to choose what really is important to get in an argument about. Your new roommate, either best friend or significant other, will have habits and living styles that should ideally come close to yours, but it will never completely match, so as the saying goes:
“Love me or leave me”
Decide what is really worthwhile arguing about and avoid nitpicking your new roomie’s habits and personality. There are reasons why you’ve chosen to move in with this person in the first place, so by communicating your needs together you will stand a chance of surviving and maybe even THRIVING in your new living arrangement!
As always, a great way to reduce the stress of moving in together is by hiring movers to take care of all the heavy lifting and packing. You Move Me can take care of all the unpleasant aspects of moving from packing all your worldly things, to arranging storage to keep those spare couches. If you’ve got friendly movers taking care of the tough stuff, you can focus on what is really important, like your friendship with your new (hopefully awesome!) roommate.
To learn more about how You Move Me Vancouver Island can help you with your next move visit our main page. There you’ll be able to learn about our process, get a free estimate and see how You Move Me can Move You!
