22 unavoidable things you’ll experience as a Liverpool student moving into a house

The day you move into your first post-halls house in Liverpool is officially the beginning of your adulthood – or so I’ve heard.

The ups and downs you’ll experience will never compare to the feeling of having your own washing machine and tumble dryer, your own purple bins to take out, and being able to avoid that weird flatmate you were stuck with for nine whole months the year before. You’ll be thriving living independently, but there are just some unavoidable aspects of student living that will hit you like a truck when you experience them for the first time. We’re here to prepare you, just in case.

1. Becoming the magical cleaning fairy

In theory, living in a house with more hangout space and bigger bedrooms should equal more fun, but for some reason it just results in constantly having something to clean up. The kitchen always filthy, the bathroom is constantly a state, and every time you pop into the living room it feels like a new empty bottle of wine has been added to the rest of the decor.

You’ll catch yourself washing up everyone else’s pasta bowls out of pure desperation, and once you start taking the bins out, you never stop. It comes as a shock to the system for everyone who lived in halls with cleaners the year before, believe me. Deep cleans are also a myth, contrary to the belief of most landlords, as your bedroom floor will most likely have a mysterious dark stain somewhere that has probably existed for well over a decade.

2. Hosting multiple accidental house parties

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The beauty of living with other students in one house is that they also double up as perfect guests for all the pre-drinks you’ll host throughout the year. However, everyone knows of a friend of a friend that insists on coming over every time, accompanied by five of their own housemates, and before you know it you’ve got 65 drunk students spilling out into your strange back-garden-patio-bin-store-smoking-area hybrid, and you don’t even know who half of them are.

As long as the TV is out of reach, and you’ve locked your bedroom door, you should be safe. People WILL steal your toilet rolls though, just to pre-warn you.

3. Adopting a family of mice – or even worse, rats

Ah, the classic part and parcel of student living. That weird scratching you hear coming from the walls at 5am? It’s not your housemates, it’s defo a family of mice eating the leftover takeaway you’ve got sat on the floor in the corner of your room. Half of the house will be freaking out, and the other half will be weirdly calm about the situation, but it’ll haunt you forever.

4. Befriending every maintenance person that enters your house

You’ll make a new friend every week through the sheer amount of maintenance people you’ll have popping by to fix your leaky taps and broken TV stands. They’re always up for a chat for some reason – I find that plumbers are particularly friendly x

5. The passive aggressive group chat messages

“I’m not trying to be a grandma but please can you keep it down I’ve got a 9am tomorrow xx”

6. Spending your student loan on decorations

Halloween. Christmas. Birthdays. Half-birthdays. Hanukkah. Eid. Easter. End of term. Summer. Probably another birthday. Fairy lights in the garden. A new rug for the living room. Stick a mirror and some houseplants in the bedrooms too while you’re at it.

You’ll never be able to resist the idea of decorating the entire house for a special occasion. Blowing your entire student loan on a miserable Christmas tree and some birthday banners sounds like such a good plan until you realise your housemates are never ever going to chip in on the cost. There’s also something about having your own proper bedroom at university that makes me want to raid IKEA for every fake plastic houseplant I could possibly fit in there.

7. Constantly resetting the Wi-Fi

Your new favourite excuse for not doing your uni work is that “the Wi-Fi isn’t working” x

8. Missing every parcel that gets delivered – because nobody answers the door anymore, apparently

Someone needs to do a scientific experiment on students’ inability to answer the door when the doorbell goes. The amount of parcels that will end up in the bins or chucked over the garden wall will actually terrify you – and Amazon Prime next day delivery doesn’t exist when you live in a house because nobody will let you know when your package has actually arrived. You’ll just find out five days later instead.

9. Never ever remembering bin day

The biggest lie ever told in any student house in Liverpool is that you’ll remember to put the bins out the night before. It’s not until you get woken up by the bin men at 6:30 in the morning that anyone even thinks to do anything about them.

Don’t think that a whiteboard on the fridge will help your housemates either – they’ll use it to write angry messages to each other, and probably some inappropriate drawings too.

10. Realising you’ve fallen victim to ‘house smell’

There’s no worse feeling in the world than sitting in your lecture and getting a good whiff of damp, mould, leftover food and general must, and realising it smells just like your house. And then realising that the smell is in fact coming from you. All student houses have a weirdly specific scent that you just can’t shift, no matter how many times you wash that slightly stained jumper you wear every time you nip to the kitchen for a sweet treat.

11. Tripping over a deserted VOI scooter every time you leave the house

Everyone’s pathways in Smithdown and Kensington look like VOI scooter graveyards. It’s pretty humbling to walk out of the house, trying to pick a song on your phone to accompany your hot girl walk, and then stumbling over a deserted scooter in front of all of the students on their way to their 9ams.

12. Having to carve ice out of the freezer every time you open it

Even better when it’s leaking meat juices!

13. Crying on the phone to your parents because the mice have come back, again

Thought you managed to sort out your rodent problem? Wrong! They’re back with vengeance this time.

14. Always contracting some kind of illness

There’s something about the combination of lecture air, living with more than three people, not touching vegetables for months at a time, and never having a day off drinking that just serves as a recipe for disaster. Someone in the house constantly has the plague, or some mutated form of Freshers’ Flu, and you’re never safe. Stock up on paracetamol before you move in.

15. Standing on the slugs in the kitchen

You haven’t experienced true disgust until you’ve walked into the kitchen barefoot at 3am and felt a strange squishy creature unexpectedly seep through the webs of your feet. The slugs in Liverpool are mutant by the way.

16. Asking your housemates if they want a cup of tea and ACTUALLY having to make said cup of tea

Remember when your mum would ask if you wanted a brew and then respond with the most passive aggressive “okay” you’ve ever heard in your life? You’ll only get it once you’ve done it yourself.

You’ll pop your head around the living room door to ask if anyone wants a cup of tea before flicking the kettle on, and all of a sudden you’re the head barista of the house making oat milk chai lattes and chamomile teas before you can even bat an eyelid. It’ll happen once, and you’ll never offer again.

17. Never going on the ‘big IKEA trip’

It’ll take you half the year to realise that you’ll never actually split the cost of that Uber to IKEA to pick up a washing up bowl and some fairy lights for your garden. Every student house falls victim to the fake promise of someone bringing their car up for a week to drive to the nearest retail park too – so that TK Maxx and B&M trip can wait until you go home at Christmas.

18. Or the house visit to Toby Carvery

You get the gist. Even Smithdown feels a million miles away from a Toby Carvery.

19. Saying you’ll walk to uni and then getting the 86 or 699 instead

It’s just too tempting to have a lie in rather than forcing yourself to join the swarm of students walking past Wag 1 Offy to get to uni in the mornings. It may be a battle to bag yourself a seat on the bus, but standing up on a sweaty, condensed metal tube full of school kids is so worth it in the long run.

20. Avoiding the boys’ bathroom at all costs

Yuck.

21. Realising that the bedroom walls are actually kind of thin

Oh you had a girl over last night? It’s ok! We all knew because the walls are paper thin and everyone piled into my room to listen to how awkward your conversation was before you did the deed. No worries!

22. Being in a constant battle to turn the heating on

The concept of uncapped bills is far too appealing when you’re living in an ancient three storey house that has half-glazed windows and freezing cold floors, right? Apparently not. It’s like World War Three trying to fight the mystery housemate that keeps turning the heating down when you’re wearing two jumpers, a dressing gown and joggers to bed every night.

Don’t let these horror stories phase you if you’re still in the honeymoon period of your second or third year house. The worst is yet to come x

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