If you’re headed to university in September, this might well be your first time living with flatmates. The kitchen is where you’ll spend most of your time together, hopefully in harmony, laughing and eating pasta as students do in stock photos. But if neglected, this room can become a site of mould-based disagreement and dish-related drama. So here are some quick tips for keeping the peace.
If your kitchen is often left in a mess, you may be tempted to leave your flatmates a note to maybe perhaps think about cleaning up after themselves, please. But that’s never a good look. Rather than concede any wrongdoing, your housemate will probably ignore your note anyway, or worse, proceed to vacuum passive aggressively while maintaining eye contact with you. Which is why you shouldn’t bother with any written rotas, either. A loose, moral sense of whose turn it is to clean the oven is fine – but avoid keeping a literal score of which housemate is laziest.
Try to adopt a communitarian approach to life in the flat. Make the occasional meal for each other, empty the bins before they become sentient, and be open to sharing. Who really cares if someone siphoned your milk for their tea? Sometimes you have to let the milk go.
But if everyone isn’t on board with this philosophy, try setting some ground rules for what is communal kitchen territory and what is private:
Fine to share:
Milk. (You can borrow someone’s milk for a cup of tea. But not for a whole béchamel, come on.)
Herbs, spices, salt and pepper.
Cheap jarred condiments, such as jam. Maybe not the expensive ones – honey, for example.
Definitely not communal:
That special cake your flatmate was given by their tearful parents.
Chocolate in any form.
Cheese, especially French or a fancy type of cheese.