Every lie you tell yourself before second year that will obviously NEVER happen

‘wE’Ll DeCORaTe ThE garDEn wiTH faIRY LigHts’

4 years ago

When the smoke finally clears on the blowout that was your fresher year you’re faced with your first real step into adulthood. A house to call your own, housemates you’ve actually met before and get along with, and a year of study that actually counts towards your degree. It’s time to fix up. To that end, you’ll make a bunch of second year resolutions so that when graduation comes along in two years you’ll be ready to face the world as a complete being.

Sadly a lot of the stuff you and your mates say you’re going to do will reveal itself to be a delusion within days of arriving at your gross abode. These are all the lies you’re currently telling yourself:

We’ll decorate the living room like a proper house

Reality: You move in and realise that decor costs money and you’re either too drunk or too tired to actually go out and get it. That “big IKEA trip” you planned at the start of term never happens and if no one has a car then good luck getting actual furniture to and from your student abode. The living room stays as bare as when you arrived save for classic student trash like red solo cups from pres and some halloween decorations you never took down.

We’ll have big parties with decorations and themes!

No, you won’t. You’ll have messy last minute pres and they’ll have the same format every time just with slightly different attendees and levels of drunkenness. Hosting is difficult and you realise quickly that you are now responsible for the clean up, from leftover alcohol bottles to other peoples’ vomit. The decorations will never happen, and maybe you’re better off not having them anyway (those glitter curtains seem like fun decor and Insta bait but they actually rip off your wallpaper and that shit eats into your deposit. Avoid at all costs.)

We’ll cook a flat roast every Sunday and it’ll be cute af

You’ll order several different takeaways at different times because you’re all hungover from different nights out. Literally the only time you’ll ever cook as a group will be Christmas, which will be a massive disaster.

We’ll draw straws to see who gets the best room and stagger the rent accordingly

Unfortunately this is where you learn that the world is not a fair place. It is simply the law that whoever gets there first gets the best and biggest room and the rest of you will have to, ahem, suck it.

We’ll put fairy lights in the garden

Will you fuck. You’ll move the fairy lights in Jess’s room outside one time, then they’ll get rained on and break. They weren’t making your grotty little garden much nicer anyways.

And we’ll spend sooooo much time out there

I had a garden at uni and the only time it got used was when the burglars used it as their entrance way to break into our house. Legit. You will never go out there unless you smoke, or live in an impossibly sunny part of England, or spend the summer at uni (which no one really does anyway). That garden is going to become an overgrown wasteland and home to excess bin bags and rats only.

We’ll shop ethically from local markets and stuff

You’ll go to Tesco like everyone else.

We’ll clean up all the mould in the bathroom and keep it spotless

By the end of the year the mould will have advanced to the point it’s literally sentient. When the time comes to move your stuff out the mould will come alive and kill you all.

We’ll respect each other’s personal space

3am and your housemate is drunkenly knocking at your door asking you for a condom because he is mere minutes away from smashing. Go away, Liam, I am sleeping.

We’ll have loads of pres and house parties – just like we did in halls

It felt like there were more of us last year

Wake up, sunshine. You’re out in the sticks now. Everyone lives literal roads apart and to get between houses you’ll have to walk outside between these abodes. You’ll quickly discover you can only get big numbers to your house when it’s a birthday. Sad.

We’ll have a fridge and a freezer drawer each

Regular and ongoing conquests will be made between you over the territory that is the fridge and freezer. It’s a war no one ever wins.

I’ll try something new… You know? Really expand my horizons

You will spend your second year doing the same stuff you did the year before. Hanging out with the same people, whether it’s sports teams societies, or your old halls mates. You’ll largely be going to the same places and sneering at the freshers for daring to have a fun time. You’ll maybe go to a new society once and never attend again.

We’ll get the landlord to fix all the stuff that’s broken

Lmao. Good one. Your landlord is not your friend – he is your jailer. You’ll email and ring to try and get him to fix the leaky shower but he’s got his fingers in his ears. That’s where they’ll stay until the inevitable day comes for him to demand your whole deposit back from you.

We’ll salvage our grade from the blowout that was first year

It will actually get worse. Ah well, there’s always third year.

The boyfriends and girlfriends won’t be here all the time – we’ll go to theirs

If your boyfriend stays at our house three nights a week, he ...

Fuck off

They’re here four days out of seven and loudly shagging just as much. It’ll get to the point you’re seriously contemplating asking them to pay rent.

We’re gonna really nail uni this year

You think you’ll study hard, get each other up at 7 to make all your 9ams, go to the gym together and generally live your best academic lives. In reality you’ll be out every other night and watching Supermarket Sweep in your PJs until 12pm most days.

We’ll get all our deposits back!!!!

You will not!!!!!

Someone will bring a Monopoly board and we’ll play twice a week like a happy family

You’ll bring it alright, but it’ll end up on top of the fridge or something gathering dust. Every now and then you’ll find a random note lying around from that one time you played it.

We’ll do group shops so we share food and stuff

Aside from milk and loo roll this will not happen. Not only will you adamantly refuse to share anything you buy, you’ll become increasingly territorial about it throughout the year until one day you start hiding your most valuable spices.

We’ll keep the house over summer and have banging garden parties all the time

You’ll go home the day after your last exam to be with your mummy and all the lovely free food she cooks you. See you cunts later.

We’ll get a pet and won’t tell the landlord

There’s always one that suggests getting a tortoise or something equally moronic and *shock* it never happens. Your landlord would throw a fit if he so much as saw a scratch on a wall, let alone a live animal you weren’t allowed in the first place. Grow up.

We’ll never fight!

Lies. Follow this golden rule for realistic expectations: You will hate at least one housemate at any given point. There is always a runt of the litter, whether they caused this themselves (“Millie just never takes out the bins?”) or grate on people through no fault of their own (“I HATE the sound of Alex’s laugh!!!”). The gripes will be petty, but all will pass and you’ll move onto another housemate to hate. No one is sacred.

On our days off uni we’ll go for walks and try and find cool places in the local area!

I can bet you any amount of money right now, nobody ever made it out of bed for the group “walks” and you cannot name one undiscovered gem of a place in your uni town.

We’ll have big group study sessions in the lounge with snacks and relaxing music

You pictured all your housemates all snuggled up on the sofas in their pyjamas with a sharing bowl of crisps and some instrumental tracks as you rattle through your essays, all in this together. But then you remember: Study? At uni? Doesn’t ever actually happen.

We’ll create a cleaning rota so the chores are split up fairly and everything stays clean!

A rota may have been pencilled up and stuck to the fridge, but within a week someone has gone out on their washing up day, forgotten to clean the bathroom conveniently when it was at its filthiest and everyone hates cleaning. Great job, guys!