Student houses are always a nightmare

You gathered your friends, had some heated arguments on Whatsapp over house size and queued up outside the letting agent at least six months before you actually had to move anywhere.

Despite this, here you are sat in your mould infested kitchen staring at the mound of unclaimed washing up that has been gradually gathering since September.

It is now that you come to admit that the concept of living with all nine of the people that you thought were your closest friends in Freshers’ was a terrible idea.

The hallway floor is an illusion that you will never see. From day one the post has been accumulating and none of it is for you. Who knows why Ben Smith still sends his bank statements to your address but he does, and you really wish he’d stop.

On top of the regular daily onslaught of all the previous tenants post you are also invited to every event in Cardiff by at least five different promoters and Domino’s never fails to keep you up to date on their ever-changing deals.

One day’s worth

Together this leads to a mountain of post that no one ever seems to deem anything to do with them.

It’s not just the hallway that’s a hazard, it’s the shower. Without mentioning the new breeds of mould that every one of our homes is growing you also have to deal with the sheer number of bottles.

Being stereotypically poor, it’s hard to accept when the shampoo bottle truly is empty, so perhaps the way to deal with this is to leave it in the shower basin and hope one day it will refill itself.

Whilst you and all of your housemates are waiting for the reappearance of shampoo the basin is filling with bottles until there’s more bottle space than foot space, as if the mould wasn’t a big enough danger itself.

It’s not a true student house until you have been visited by the Waste Coordinator, to point out that your front garden isn’t meant to be a breeding ground for rats.

They seem to forget that you lead a very busy life between drinking and sleeping and that this does not leave time for you to decide if your leftover takeaway containers are recyclable. As a result, your black bin has been full since freshers and the pile of black bin bags is gradually growing

Smiling through the struggle

On top of all this you are struggling with the lack of privacy. Poo paranoia is real and it’s made worse by the fact you can’t afford the water bill if you keep the taps running. The dream of bills being included is gone and now you can’t even do your business without the fear of your housemates hearing through the paper thin walls.

So as you stand at your bathroom sink trying to scrape the last bit of toothpaste out of your housemate’s tube just think – is this what you expected from your first rental?