Living with Housemates—Tips on Keeping the Fridge Manageable

Oh yuck… you open the door of the fridge and it’s full of nasty containers of dead stuff. Or is it? Who knows? You know they aren’t yours, so you can’t throw them out. Can you? No, you can’t. Different people treat kitchen space differently, which is why we always recommend figuring out your needs before moving in with someone.  

Allotting Space in the Fridge

The refrigerator in most home share situations is a communal appliance. And it is THE central appliance Everyone uses it. So how do you use share it successfully?

Assign Spaces

The best plan is to have areas for each person in the house share. Top shelf, bottom shelf, left-hand crisper,  etc. Just make an agreement as part of the moving in process. Lay it out and make it clear whose area is whose.

It just doesn’t work to be loosey-goose about this. We all forget stuff in the fridge.  That left-over from the Chinese restaurant? The half can of soup? Whose onion is turning soft and liquid? Things simply get lost and then it then they get yucky. The fridge becomes a mess quickly.

Cleaning

Speaking of messes. Communal refrigerators lend themselves to being crowded and moldy. So here’s what you do.

At an agreed upon time (Sunday evening, Saturday morning, whatever works where the most people are home) one person takes everything out of the refrigerator and places it on counters and tables. With the fridge now empty, the same person cleans the fridge.

Then each person has a certain amount of time to retrieve items from the counters and return them to their area of the fridge. A reasonable amount of time might be two hours.  At the conclusion of that time, the person cleaning the fridge takes everything left on the counters and throws it out.

Voila! you now have a clean fridge.

Here are more posts you might find helpful: Refrigerator Organization, How Would You Ask for Change? and Uncluttered and Clean.

Photo by Old Youth on Unsplash