It's not as crazy as you'd imagine: How Jane found herself living in a 14-person share house

When Jane Moughan moved from Wellington to Melbourne in November 2017, everyone told her to join a netball team to make friends in her new city.

She joined a 14-person share house instead.

“The appeal was finding a friendship group,” she explains. “Moving from New Zealand, I didn’t know anyone in Melbourne, so it was like moving into an instant friendship group. It was the easiest way to meet people.”

Nestled in the streets of inner-city Melbourne, Moughan shares a home with 13, sometimes 14, people. It has five bathrooms, three showers, 13 bedrooms, a big kitchen and a large living and dining space.

So how do you make so many people in one place work?

“We’ve all got our own rooms, shelves in the fridge and cupboards to pop our stuff in,” Moughan says. The flatmates don’t always cook together, she says, but come summer, will often co-operate on “big family dinners or barbecues”.

The bathrooms, she says, are hotly contested.

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“We all have such different schedules, it actually works, however. Some are students, some are working, some are hospitality workers,” she says.

She has picked up a few tricks. “I don’t leave my toothbrush in the bathroom, because if someone gets into the bathroom before I do and all three bathrooms are occupied, you can’t brush your teeth. So now I just keep everything in a toilet bag.”

And everyone has a favourite bathroom. “We all have to be pretty strategic about which ones we use and when,” Moughan says. “For example, there are two girls I live with who work on a similar schedule to me, and they use the bathroom at the end of the house. So, I don’t use that bathroom – I use a bathroom that two students use, so we don’t have any dramas.

“You do have to be a little bit more organised and you really need to know know each other’s schedules.”

“We all have different priorities about how much we want to socialise, but most people who move into the flat are keen to make friends.”

And though each housemates has signed a six-month minimum lease, turnover is “relatively high”. So much so, Moughan says, sometimes it’s hard to recognise your own roommates.

“There was one time when one of my housemates started seeing a new girlfriend, and it took me two weeks to realise she wasn’t just a new housemate and she didn’t even live there.”

When Moughan explains how she lives, the usual reaction is shock, she says. “They always ask how many bathrooms and how you cope and if it’s crazy. And it’s actually not. At times it can be a little bit intense, but it’s not as crazy as you’d imagine.”

There are a few downsides, she admits.

“A major downside is the dishes, you can have just cleaned the kitchen and leave for 10 minutes and someone will have left a glass in the sink. We don’t have a dishwasher, so you really have to rely on people being good.” she says.

“The other is choosing what to watch on Netflix in the lounge. We don’t have the greatest internet, because there are so many of us. It’s fine, we just don’t have a particularly fast connection, so everyone does hang out in the lounge and watch TV together. It can take us a long time to settle on a movie and by the time we decide, it’s time to go to bed.”

And then there’s making friends only for them to move out, or go back home.

“Because we have such a high turnover, you make so many close friends, but a lot of them go back overseas or move home,” she says.

“You meet people from all around the world, so hopefully I’ll have places to couch-surf eventually.”

To hear the full interview head to Domain’s new podcast, Somewhere Else on Apple podcasts and Google podcasts.