House hunting in Bristol is always a nightmare

Living as a student in Bristol, we are cursed with the fact that everyone seems to start looking for their second year homes very early on. You’ve barely made it to the Christmas holidays and people are already talking about who they want to have as future housemates months down the line.

After only just settling in, you now have to commit to basically marrying a selection of your very new friends. And you have to be excited about it.

It is guaranteed that none of you who are looking for/have found a house for next year have stuck to your original plan. At first, no one wants to leave each other and everyone must stick together. A big happy family and all that.

You couldn’t possibly split up, especially due to the life long loyalties you have to your new best friends of only about four months. You look around houses that are way out of your league. You are a student, not a financially stable family home seeker.

Selling yourself dreams

Everyone understands the stress of suggesting that you should split up. Simply telling people that they can no longer live with you, or being told that you can’t live with a group of people anymore is even more painful than it sounds. I don’t know which is worse.

Excitable groups of ten will change to anxious groups of six, which will slide further down into morbid groups of four. It’s brutal.

Once you’ve secured your group of housemates (your new husbands and wives) for the following academic year, you realise that it really is time to finally find a house. Achieving this end result has somehow been forgotten about after all the disagreements, different group chats and deposits lost (not forgetting friendships).

Think like the adult that you are

You drastically lower your standards and accept that you do not, in fact, need a four story house in Harbourside equipped with a TV in each of the ten bedrooms (which you enjoy telling everyone ‘I told you so’ about) and once again embrace your student reality. This even goes as far as not caring that one of your potential house choices in Horfield shares a wall with the prison.

Realising you’ve been ripping yourself off on websites with ridiculous agency fees, you find comfort in discovering the cheaper houses offered by UWE’s student lettings. Your estate agent becomes your second mum, she even drives you home after a viewing. You’ve done it at last and secured yourself a generic ‘just off Gloucester Road’ house. You’re not going to be homeless.

The sad reality is that if you only just started looking for a house now, you would be fine, and stress free. But at least it’s over.

Not long until this is you