Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates will help you.
It is full of tips, tools, interviews and stories. These tools work for anyone looking to share housing, from college students to professionals, empty nesters, seniors and more.
It will teach you how to:
- Eliminate incompatible people before you live together.
- How to write an ad.
- How to negotiate the details of living together.
- What kinds of background checks and references are helpful.
You will learn an easy-to-follow process that works with all types of shared housing, from short-term housing to long-term, to committed intentional communities.
Buy Now
Testimonial
My housemate helps me afford the housing costs in LA so I can stay near my son after retirement. And it is so much more fun than living alone!
The book and web site helped me a great deal. Your techniques gave me the confidence to begin and it has worked out beautifully.
At first the idea of a housemate seemed scary because one imagines all of the possible problems. Your book helped me prepare mentally by showing me how it could be done sensibly. I am a recently divorced boomer who had 30 years of accumulated stuff! I agree that making space for a housemate is crucial and that getting rid of stuff is emotional work. I felt so free once the Habitat for Humanity truck pulled away! I now had room in my life for more adventures.
Anonymous by request
I put the word out to everyone I knew that I wanted a housemate and by word of mouth found another woman in my situation who was thrilled to find affordable rent in the Los Angeles area. We are having a ball because I used your techniques for describing my expectations for daily life and household habits. We knew we could be compatible because she had similar expectations.
The Workbook
The companion workbook to Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates is for you to think, feel, and ponder how the information in the book is relevant to your situation and who you are.
In the book, each chapter has a worksheet. You can use it in the book, but they are small. All the worksheets are reproduced in the workbook in a full-size format with a spiral binding so that you can write on them flat and you can keep your work together.
In addition to the worksheets, there are checklists and tracking sheets for organizing your home-mate search. Keep all your notes in one place so that you can easily reference them. You can download all the worksheets individually if you’d prefer.
The book was selected Washington Post’s Color of Money, Book of the Month.(June, 2011)
Reviews
Annamarie does a masterful job of guiding a person through the difficult task of finding and keeping a roommate—very even-handed in her portrayal of the options one has in each phase of the process. I think this book will become a ‘must have’ in the years ahead as people want to or are forced to find ways to conserve resources, space, and emotional energy!”
Annette Leahy Maggitti, Program Director, St. Ambrose Homesharing
For the past sixty years, Americans have concentrated on building bigger houses farther apart from each other. It’s been environmentally ruinous, and it’s made us kind of lonely. Here’s a good practical antidote!”
Bill McKibben, author, environmentalist, and educator
This book is incredibly helpful to anyone thinking of living with housemates.
It reviews all the details you could possibly use when thinking of living with other adults at any phase of your life. From the thinking of how to advertise for the right person, to sample ads which would let you screen for suitable people, Pluhar leaves no stone unturned in thinking of tips for someone who is new to living with strangers.
She also manages to make completely readable guidelines for living together which might be extremely useful if someone had little experience in living in a shared home. Often, I see people who are not sure why their joint living arrangements have failed…or why others consider them “difficult” to live with.
This book makes clear what works, and Pluhar has the experience to make her teaching points in a completely practical and gentle way. She has taken a topic, which has great relevance in our world where sharing will have to become more usual, and made it lucid and readable.”
Jacqueline Olds MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
Co-author of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century
I have a roommate now! I had completely dismissed the idea of having a roommate…the idea of sharing my living space totally turned me off… The book helped me think of the qualities in a roommate that would work for me..three months later, we getting along very well. I am surprised. If not for the book, I would not have opened my mind to housesharing as a possibility for me. Great book, highly recommended for someone on the fence about getting a housemate.”
Suzanne Bansley, Vermont (Click to read about her experience.)
Thanks to Annamarie, I found the perfect housemate. I read the book she wrote and then used her as a resource. The ad I posted in Craigslist got a number of compliments and the people that answered were all ‘close’ to what I was looking for. One person I interviewed (using Annamarie’s suggestions again) stood out as a really good match. Since he moved in, it’s been a pleasure to share my house with him.”
Nancy Shepard
What’s in the book—Table of Contents
Introduction: Do You Want to Share Housing?
GETTING READY
- Initial Decisions—The Householder
- Initial Decisions—The Home Seeker
- How Do You Want to Live?
FINDING GOOD HOUSEMATES
- Finding Each Other
- Getting the Word Out
- Contact and Interviews
- Checking References
- Pets
- Children
KEEPING GOOD HOUSEMATES
- Moving In and The First Week
- Daily Living, Sharing the Home
- Guidelines for Happy Households
- Managing Conflicts
- When It Isn’t Working
Ordering
Guarantee
If for any reason you are not satisfied with Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding And Keeping Good Housemates, we will happily refund your purchase upon return of the items.
Questions about the Purchasing Book and Workbook
If you live outside the United States, are looking for volume discounts, or have another question about obtaining the book or workbook please use this form to contact us.
The book can also be bought at Amazon and is available as a Kindle book.
