Moving into a house is the worst part about second year

You’ve moved out of halls and are settling into your second year house with your closest uni pals. You’re another step towards become a functioning adult human being and everything will be great for the first few weeks.

It won’t last though, turns out your housemates are shit, everything is broken, and your landlord is Lucifer’s agent on Earth. Prepare yourselves for a long year, second years. I’ve lived through everything that will go wrong in your second year house so that you don’t have to.

Everything will break

All that was gold will eventually turn to dust so it would be a shock if your cheap and nasty student house withstood the test of time better than the rest of us. Your landlord hasn’t decked out your house with competent furniture and sturdy fittings. That would require them not to operate on the same level as the people in your lectures who are working hard towards a first class honours, or war criminals who have committed a number of atrocities.

We don’t talk anymore

Landlords and lettings agents

If you put Voldermort and Alan Sugar in a branch of Townends, shook it about a bit and then opened the door, your typical student landlord or lettings agent would stumble out, ready to steal your money. When you signed the house they were the nicest person you’d ever met, right? Turns out they are the lousiest, money-grabbing lowlifes around – the antithesis to Robin Hood.

They’ll make you argue for every penny of your deposit that you desperately need back. My finest moment in dealing with lettings agents? “I honestly can’t believe you’re trying to shaft me over a desk.”

Hygiene

Turns out there’s a reason for doing your washing up. It’s not just unsightly. At the end of last year my housemates and I all developed coughs which we finally attributed to an airborne disease, after cleaning up the dirty plates when we were moving out to discover a number of thriving bacterial communities . Turns out our house was very multicultural, but unfortunately of the microbiological variety.

End of week one

The Council

Until you’ve received an angry letter from the council concerning your bins, you haven’t lived. Having your first angry conversation with your housemates about how it’s ridiculous that the council only give you one bin for nine people and that they will only collect it every two weeks in your early twenties is the first step towards a quarter life crisis.

Our bin situation got so bad that every few months we would have to give up an evening and, under the cover of darkness, complete shuttle runs up to campus. Clutching a few bin bags at a time, we would dispose of our rubbish in any bin we could find. Not how most people envisage spending their time at university.

There’ll be a house breakup and you’ll all hate each other by the end

There comes the point, only a couple of months into your tenancy, when you once again have to have that awkward conversation to separate the wheat from the chaff. You hear whispers of properties where a ‘house-divide’ exists after a conscious uncoupling, but the contract still has seven months to run.

Housemates become divided into camps that don’t speak to each other, you hope it doesn’t happen to you. Personal space is reduced even further when moving from halls to a house, making run-ins with ‘the others’ even more likely than when you had to avoid the weirdo in first year who had brought his samurai sword collection to uni and was shocked when your group decided not to live with him.