12 signs you live in a shitty uni house

Your shower may not be able to get hotter than lukewarm and your desk chair is potentially missing a wheel. The inspirational tapestry is actually covering the probably very dangerous black mould, and your bins are overflowing.

If you do live in a shitty uni house, I can guarantee you can relate to at least one of these.

You’ve researched how to remove mould

It’s actually a bit worrying how accustomed students have become to mould in their house. Removing it becomes less of a serious issue and more of an annoying chore you have to do on the regular. Most people just leave it until they start waking up in the middle of the night heaving, or it starts making their clothes stink. This isn’t the best idea, but when your landlord only comes around and wipes it off with a few paper towels, then what else are you supposed to do.

You don’t know what your Landlord looks like

You signed your contract nearly a year before you moved in and you haven’t seen them since. There’s the occasional text to tell them something is broken or leaking and they send someone out to fix it, never actually coming to look themselves. Despite promises made at the viewing to be round whenever you need them, you couldn’t even describe them for a facial composite. What was their name again?

Your Landlord is a ‘Jack of all Trades’

The other end of this is that you see your landlord constantly. Any issue you report is followed up by “I’ll come and take a look” because your landlord is obviously trained in everything from electrics to being a locksmith. If it’s not your landlord then it’s their brother, cousin or grandmother. Quite the family business they’ve got going.

Yet, even though they have this vast amount of skill, they’ll be coming over a month later to ‘fix’ the same issue.

You’ve never walked bare foot in your kitchen

This one’s understandable, it’s a small price to pay to avoid catching the plague from your kitchen. There’s something about student kitchens where, no matter how much you hoover, mop or clean, the kitchen floor always stays dirty. Even just socks is a bit too risky, so always make sure you have protective footwear on at all times.

You can see your breath when it’s cold

And you wonder why students don’t get out of bed? They are, typically, old, Victorian houses with no insulation and a bad heating system. It is not uncommon to be able to see your breath because of how cold it is.

It’s hard enough writing essays without having to worry about getting frostbite from getting your hands out of your covers.

Your tea towels will give you a disease

They don’t get used for drying clean dishes because they’re either not cleaned or left to drain (for a week), so a tea towel is mainly used in place of a cloth. They clean up spillages, soak up leaks on the floor and are used to quickly put out small kitchen fires (or start them). There’s always about six out at a time and none of them are ever clean. To be honest, even when they are put in the washing machine they seem to come out even worse. Best to just leave them alone.

There’s a traffic cone in your house

Sure, it’s hilarious when you’re wasted walking home from Crisis at three am. But after that, you’ve just got a dirty cone in your house. A dog has probably weed on it and now it’s just chilling where you make your food. It is a classic uni joke which must be continued for traditions sake, but honestly, just leave it outside.

You have party decorations up constantly

You threw one party back in September and just never took the decorations down. You probably can’t even remember who the “happy birthday” balloons were for but you do know the room wouldn’t look the same without them. It weirdly adds a bit of character to your living room and you’ve all become a bit attached to them. Either that or you’ve still got that £5 Christmas tree up in May.

You have the “recycling corner”

If you have an ever-growing tower of pizza boxes and cheap, empty vodka bottles in the corner of your kitchen then I’m sorry to break it to you, but you qualify for the shitty uni house. As a house you all definitely expect someone to take the bins out, resulting in no-one doing it and the tower of recycling quickly turns into a mountain.

You definitely started the recycling tower with a huge cardboard box you kept “as a bin” but now you can’t see it under rows of Stella tinnies, just take your bins out.

You have designated washing up piles

This seems like a great idea in theory, designated washing up piles means you can keep your stuff out of the way and no arguments about who hasn’t washed their stuff up, right? Wrong x

You can guarantee there will never be any pans to use as, apparently, they need to soak for four days after boiling pasta. Someone will use your wok, the only one, just before you need to use it and the kitchen will stay as dirty as it always was.

You consider the rat in your garden a pet

Every so often you’ll be eating dinner and see the rat stroll into your garden as if it owns the place. To be fair, it’s probably been there longer than you have. At first you were all horrified but now, since it’s not coming in the house, it’s not really an issue. You’ve probably named it Rodney or Remy or Roger the Rat and consider it the extra member of the household.

If you start throwing out food for it then you’ve taken it too far. It’s a rat.

Your roof fell down

There’s not much else to say on this one…

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