Sheldon’s Roommate Agreement Comes to Life

4 min readJun 27

Image created in Midjourney. Prompt: two women buy a home together in a colorful graphical style. Several variations were made to arrive at the above image.

My best friend and I are considering buying a home together. We’ve joked several times that we’re going to need a Roommate Agreement like Sheldon and Leonard in The Big Bang Theory. Ours will intentionally NOT be one sided as the one in the show is and likely won’t include such esoteric subjects as a Godzilla clause. That said, I’m not sure either of us will rule out a housemate review clause.

We’ve been thinking about whether this kind of living arrangement was a good idea for us for many years. Now that it’s real enough we’re looking at houses and seeing if we qualify for a mortgage together, we’ve also talked in more detail about the “roommate agreement”. The goal isn’t to define how we will act in the home, but in how we will collaborate and make decisions about a major purchase that requires ongoing maintenance and upkeep. It will also guide, to some degree, what happens should one of us decide that we want “out” of the home at a later point.

Should you find yourself in a position to share a home with another person and want to write up your own agreement, here are some questions we’re talking through together and documenting. These could also be appropriate for sharing a space for a small business.

We’ll be working with a lawyer to finalize an actual agreement should we need one. Additionally, many of these questions you can’t actually spell out in an agreement, nor would you want to. However, talking through them before you enter into a major purchase or lease together is probably still a good idea.

I’m going to use “home” here to mean purchasing a house together, most of these questions would also fit if you were buying a facility for a business or even renting an apartment with roommates.