Living in Granville has its perks, but I hate the never-ending parking lot construction

It makes campus a little less beautiful

In every dorm, there’s a way to escape annoying roommates, horrible food and disgusting laundry machines, but if you live in Granville Towers, there’s no way to escape the never-ending construction that goes on at UNC.

Every day on my way home from class, I look around and admire the beauty of campus, but those thoughts quickly end when I approach Granville and see mile-high dirt piles and building materials strewn about the parking lot. At least it’s concealed with a pretty chainlink fence, right?

Every morning, I’m woken up to the sound of men yelling, jackhammers chiseling and excavators beeping for an incessant amount of time. This all happens around 7am. I thought I would be lucky living next to the window, but I thought wrong. I try to go back to sleep but the sounds just get louder and more persistent. Every 10 seconds, I hear some sort of hammering sound that makes me want to scream.

This has been happening all semester, so at least I’m not surprised by it anymore. I’m so used to the noise that now I feel uncomfortable when it stops. It goes on all day, every day, so I feel like something is wrong when I get into my dorm and hear complete silence.

At least I have a front-row view of the construction, so I’ve been following its progress all year long. It’s always nice to look out my window and see a giant, half-constructed building blocking everything in sight.

Let’s not forget the cranes that swing in front of my window, day after day. I can only imagine what would happen if one of those things hit my building.

Going to sleep is always an adventure, too. Sometimes they do night construction and it goes on until about 5am, but you never know when that’s coming. It’s always a fun surprise to be woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of the “hammer from Hell.”

Recently, they’ve had this enormous industrial light they keep on all night long, and it’s really difficult to block out the light coming off of it. Living in Granville has its perks, but this is definitely not one of them. College has introduced me to new things and new challenges, but this is one I was certainly not prepared for.

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