Things I Learnt Living in a Student House
Things I Learnt Living in a Student House
As you may know I'm a uni student. The first thing I thought of when I got accepted in to my first choice uni was where I would live and like many prospective freshers I thought it was going to be great fun with housemate dinners, watching the same series on Netflix and ending up with a group of people who would become your best friends and read funny stories of your time at uni at your wedding. I was wrong.
Here's what I learnt living in a shared house...
Boys are messy
I know it's a stereotype but they are! They don't put the toilet seat down, they don't wash their dishes and are quite happy to leave any communal area in a pig sty until you give in and head in with a fumigator.
Your room will be a mis-match of furniture
Most likely ikea or pine. And leftover plastic coat hangers from the previous tenant. It will not look anything like the rooms on instagram.
You'll draw up a cleaning rota but nobody will stick to it
It's great at the start of term, when you've just moved in and everyone is still putting on a perfect housemate front. This will soon end and the bathroom will look like war torn Baghdad.
Toilet trouble
Talking about bathrooms, between 8 people there were only two showers. One didn't work. This meant there was always a wait to use the popular bathroom, which awkwardly was in the kitchen and meant making the walk of shame back to your room through the kitchen in a towel.
You will not have the same tastes
You will hate each others music and there will always be one person who insists on playing it loud enough to drown out your own thoughts.
Washing up wars
Without parents there to nag... it will not get done. And if you're a little OCD like myself, this will become a living nightmare and you will avoid the kitchen at all costs.
The borrowers
At first sharing might seem fun, but by the end of my time in a shared house I kept my own set of cutlery and crockery in my bedroom. Anything left in the bathroom will disappear and if you dare lend out clothes you will likely never see them return.
Food frenzy
The idea of doing a communal shop and making family meals is great - but it doesn't work. You will all like different foods and if like me you have unusual dietary requirements it is just never going to work. You will resign to doing your own weekly shop on Monday and wake up the next morning the rest of your flat eating your cereal.
Sofa stealers
It's great having people to chat to all the time, but when you inevitably make your own friends after freshers week the sight of strangers passed out on the sofa is all too common. One night I went to the bathroom to be startled by the stranger on the sofa I hadn't noticed walking in on me.
Night Owls
It's a fact that freshers tend to party all night and sleep all day. You will be kept up until 4am on a Sunday when you have a 9am Monday morning lecture.
Going home will feel like heaven
Tea towels will not be crusty, pans will not be burnt out and you won't have to rifle through two weeks of dirty dishes to find your frying pan. You won't have to dry your washing by hanging it out your window and you won't have to climb past over flowing bins and a recycling mountain of pizza boxes and beer bottles. If you're really lucky your parents might even do the cooking (not a bowl of dry cereal for dinner) for you.
These were just a few things I learnt from sharing a house with 7 other people. It wasn't all bad and I had some fun along the way, but it was definitely not what I expected and definitely not the perfect scenario written about in university prospectuses!
Disclaimer: keep this info in mind but don't be put off by sharing a house at uni, I am a very unusual character with a lifestyle that doesn't quite fit in to student life!