Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates

Description

Sharing Housing: A Guidebook for Finding and Keeping Good Housemates, is our resource for home seekers and householders who want to live better in shared housing. Our guidebook teaches you the benefits of living in shared housing, prepares you for the process of finding a good housemate, and gives you tips on how to live well with housemates. If you’ve ever wondered about whether or not shared housing is right for you, or how to get started on your journey, our guidebook is a great place to start!

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.

-Jacqueline Olds MD, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
co-author of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the 21st Century

Years of Expertise

The author of the guidebook, and founder of Sharing Housing Inc., Annamarie Pluhar has been living in shared housing most of her adult life, and teaching shared housing since 2013. Over the decades she has developed systems for building a safe, comfortable shared home, and learned first hand how to live well with others. She took all her experience and knowledge as an instructional designer and put it into our guidebook.

What’s In The Book

Our guidebook is divided into three sections:

• Getting Ready: Learn how to prepare yourself for shared housing, take stock of your needs, and make important decisions before you start looking for a housemate.
• Finding Good Housemates: At Sharing Housing Inc. we’ve developed a step-by-step process for finding a housemate that works for you. In this section we’ll take you through each step of the process and the most important things to consider when looking for shared housing.
• Keeping Good Housemates: Once you’ve found a housemate, what next? This section contains guidelines for living well with others, tips on how to resolve housemate conflict, and advice on how to tell when your shared housing situation isn’t working.

Each one of these sections contains exercises and worksheets to help make the process of finding a good housemate easy, as well as stories and examples that illustrate how to live well in shared housing.

Praise for the Guidebook

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

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