Suggestions for Improving Your Extra Room for Prospective Flatmates

Flatshare to rent with breakfast included – sounds like a tempting offer for a prospective flatmate. Don’t think your spare room is going to turn into a bed and breakfast lodgings, you have to think of renting out your spare room as a medium to long term proposition. This is completely different than putting someone up for a few days and feeding them. Your spare room has to be a self-contained unit so that your roommate flatmate can live there without disturbing you at all.

If you are about to embark on renting out a spare room for the medium to long term, there are quite a few things you need to plan in advance. You may have to clean and tidy the room, then decorate it, than kitted it out with all the necessary things to make it a self-contained living area.

Make a list of all the things you need to do, in stages. Then do each stage a bit at a time. this way the process will seem more manageable and if you get friends and family to help, the manual work will be a lot less.

Quality inhibiting factors stopping people from making use of a spare room for flatmate or roommates, is the cost of decorating and adding furniture. You don’t have to do spend money on the latest new designer furniture to attract potential roommate. There are plenty of second-hand discount stores which specialise in good quality, second-hand furniture. Make a list of all the things you need them locate some of these places in your local area. Most will be in warehouses, which means you will have more choice. Second-hand also means that you can possibly haggle over the price, so do so.

You just have to make your spare rooms comfortable and liveable to be attractive to live in. Other amenities that flatmate will need, such as bathroom facilities, you can share in the house, but make sure you set down ground rules from the start so everybody knows where they stand.

This goes for any other shared facilities in the house. For example, if you have to share the washing machine, make sure you agree on the shared usage and shared bills. Do this at the beginning and there will be no arguments down the road.

The main things you need to remember when starting out on turning your spare room into a roommates living space, is to plan out all the things you need for the space, starting by listing all the criteria you would like for all shared facilities you will have in-house.

Basically, you need to document all the things you can think of which you and the roommate will share. There will always be things you forget or leave out, for example parking space usage, but as long as you document the most important things in the house, the minor things you can discuss later on. If you do these things you should have a happy partnership with your roommate.