Tips on Sharing a Townhome Kitchen

[mom31257]

Dd returns to college for the month of June. She will be in Townhome housing on campus with 3 girls she doesn't know. No cafeteria services are available for the summer, so she's feeding herself.

 

Any tips or advice on storage and managing it would be appreciated!

 

We've bought her a lot of kitchen utensils and supplies because we don't know what the other people are planning to bring.

 

She doesn't have a car but a local friend, and my dad and sister, who are 45 minutes away, can take her to the store when she needs to go.

Edited May 28, 2016 by mom31257

[JFSinIL]

My son found that keeping certain items in a a locked bedroom closet :-( was needed as otherwise stuff disappeared w/o being replaced. And one roommate ruined a good stockpot I had bought him, so he started keeping his better bake ware and pots in his room, too. I have had roommates in my past who all wanted to join forces, shop together and cook and eat the same dinners...and ones that preferred everyone to do their own thing, and each person got a shelf in the fridge and had to be reasonable about the freezer.

Edited May 27, 2016 by JFSinIL

[JFSinIL]

Oh, and the roomies getting together and figuring out how they want to manage things is crucial. Plus make sure she has plenty of seal-able storage for stuff since you do not know how clean a place is re: roaches, mice, ants.

[Guest]

I never shared food with roommates.

[PeppermintPattie]

My son and his roommates each had their own dishes, silverware, glasses, and mugs so that it was clear who was leaving their dishes unwashed.

[ThisIsTheDay]

My dd has shared an on campus apartment with three other roommates whom she didn't know for soph, jr, and will for sr year. Each year has been a different group of girls. Generaly, the girls have just each taken 1/4 of the fridge, nothing official, just sort of claim it for themselves.  There has been no food sharing or eating together.  One group used their own dishes/utensils/cookware. One group more or less shared what was there. Dd ended up taking her Fiestaware into her room though.

 

The first year went really well.  The big problem for the second year was that one girl was a slob, leaving dirty dishes in the sink, cramming the kitchen garbage to overfull regularly, stacking stuff upon stuff in the bathroom garbage.  The other girls had to clean up after her, and that was frustrating. They would resort to leaving little signs for each other, "Please take garbage out when full," etc. which didn't have any effect.

[Guest]

We shared pots and pans and plates etc, but labeled EVERYTHING food-wise.

 

Everyone was expected to clean up after themselves, and problems there were extremely predictable.

 

We had house meetings to air it out and rally around the super messy people to clean their biz, and to get the super stickler clean ppl to chill out some. So we ended up in the middle-ground, always. No one else cared about cleaning the inside of the fridge, so I just did it because I was the only one with a problem.

 

These were all dudes, fwiw.

[hornblower]

I lived in a res where there were 6 of us in a pod. Each had private room & we shared bathrooms & kitchen. We divvied up the kitchen cupboards & the fridge shelves & pretty much kept our stuff separate. Every one was expected to clean up after themselves.