Horrendous house hunting

Your typical student kitchen

In my experience, house-hunting has always proved a rather stressful business. No matter how many times the university’s Accommodation Office announces that there is no shortage of student properties, no need to rush into anything, we are nevertheless consumed with a nagging suspicion that if we wait much longer, all the best places will be taken and we will be left with a hovel five miles away from university that hasn’t been renovated since they started building indoor bathrooms. And so we traipse from property to property, (invariably in the rain) in search of that perfect place which is both affordable and inhabitable.

Girls inevitably take a different approach to this than boys. While we search for a place with a ‘homely feel’ and argue over who is going to have the bedroom with the fireplace, boys’ most pressing concern is whether there is space to plug in their Wii. The use of a kitchen or bathroom is a secondary concern.

After viewing several places whose sanitation levels were dubious, to say the least, my would-be flat-mates and I finally found our perfect house. Maybe perfect is an exaggeration, but it did have large bedrooms, a decent kitchen and a square of concrete at the back that would be ideal for summer barbeques. After the horrors we had seen so far, we were more than satisfied. Cue a nail-biting dash to the landlady, in a slapstick style race against the other group looking around at the same time as us. We got there literally half a minute before them, and left feeling pretty smug at our good fortune.

However, the smugness has started to wear off somewhat since we have taken a second look around our new home. Several months have passed since we first signed the contract, and our tenancy has now begun. Seeing the place gutted of the last tenants’ belongings, it doesn’t look quite as good as we remembered. The musty smell of damp and disuse assails you the moment you step through the front door, so overpowering that I suspect it is a cunning ploy to distract us from the house’s many other defects. The furniture clearly has not been replaced since the fifties, and indeed most of it looks like it has been bought at car-boot sales and thrown haphazardly into our rooms, creating a vintage junk-shop effect. The armchairs in the lounge are, upon inspection, even worse than they appear, as you sink about six inches as soon as you sit on them, and the lurid purple bathroom suite which we previously told ourselves was ‘quirky’ is now simply vomit-inducing. An ominous damp stain is spreading across the wall, and the snail trails weaving across the carpets leaves me with a sneaky feeling that we are not the only inhabitants.

I know that landlords are often loath to do-up properties that they believe will be trashed by lazy students who happily pass a whole year without so much as washing up. And judging by the flats of some of my friends they have a point. Even getting through the front door can be a challenge, as the piles of empty beer bottles and discarded take-away cartons create an impressive indoor assault course. But this is not true of everyone. And in any case, landlords may complain about messy student tenants, but they are not so quick to complain about banking our extortionately inflated rent each month. So maybe trashing the place for a year is just fair pay-back?

Student houses are always slightly shitty. It is an unwritten rule of student life, right after living on Sainsbury’s Basics Vodka and pot noodles, and developing a Neighbours addiction. But that doesn’t mean that we are not allowed to complain about being charged a lot to live somewhere that any normal, non-student person wouldn’t even want anyway. We are not looking for pastel coloured walls and matching cushions and curtains. In fact, having curtains at all is a bonus. I’m just saying that living somewhere that’s been decorated this century would be nice.

Related posts:

1. Bog-roll in the student house
2. Rubber gloves anyone? Cleaning the student house
3. Not quite Sex and the City: Life in Paris
4. The horror of housing

Tags: Buyer's remorse, Damp student house, Eleri Williams, Finding a student house, Getting a student house, Housing, Housing in Birstol, Lazy Students, Living with Boys, Student Accomodation, University of Bristol