Sharing a flat and I have nowhere to keep any of this

Question

I share a flat with two other people. Communal bathroom, communal kitchen, and my bedroom door does not lock. Everyone is perfectly nice and nobody goes through my things, but there is a difference between trusting people and leaving a cleaning brush on a shared shelf.

The wearing part is fine. It is everything around it that I have not solved. Where do you keep spare parts, where do you clean things, and how do you deal with the fact that any of this coming up in conversation would be a genuinely bad week.

discreet_d · Accepted Answer

A small lockable box in your room and a washbag that leaves the bathroom with you every time. That is nearly all of it. The rest is not leaving anything to dry anywhere shared, ever, no matter how briefly, because briefly is when things get borrowed.

office_owen · Answer

Add a boring cover story for the box if anyone asks. Not a lie exactly, just a dull true thing. Mine has passport and documents written on it and it does have my passport in it.

rinse_and_dry · Answer

Cleaning is the harder half in a shared flat because the honest answer involves time in a bathroom you do not control. What works is doing it in the shower rather than at the sink, so the whole thing is one activity that takes the length of a shower and leaves nothing on any surface.

shared_bathroom_s · Answer

In the shower is obvious now you say it. I have been treating it as a separate operation at the sink at two in the morning, which is exactly the furtive behaviour someone would eventually notice.

Sharing a flat and I have nowhere to keep any of this

Write your reply

More in Life while locked