adventures from the front line of flat sharing
Before I decided getting my own place was the best way to preserve my sanity
I had many years of flat sharing and in some cases endured seems like a better word.
In College I initially shared with strangers, I was 24 and was put in with three eighteen year old
girls who had never lived away from home so that was an experience. For the most part they weren't that bad
once you got past the part where one of them walked around drinking wicked ( blue pre mixed vodka) like it was juice
and honestly I wasn't much of a grown up so we got on ok and threw some decent parties except for the one where we all
left the apartment at the same time and someone threw our phone out the window. In the end we didn't have much in common,
two of the girls were from the same small town where they spent their weekends fighting other girls and cruising the town to see
what was happening (not much would be my estimation) and one of the girls had a boyfriend, who is quite possibly now in
prison if his life plan worked out well, who didn't really like me possibly something to do with my accent or my grasp of the English language which far surpassed his.
It was fine, It was a year by then I'd made friends and plans to live with them.
Sometimes house sharing makes you closer and sometimes It doesn't, In second year I shared with two friends and by the end of that I
only wanted to live with one of them again. I think sometimes if have nothing in common with someone living with them
can only highlight that. To be honest living with friends was never a big issue but after second year in college I decided I was
sick of the commute home every weekend to work and got a job closer to college. The only downside is none of my friends had the
same idea so I was left with two choices, I could either move out of college accommodation and find strangers to live with or
I could stay put and have the college chose them for me. In hindsight I really should have gone for option number two.
The first summer I stayed down It wasn't too bad, if looked past the fact that the guy they put living with me couldn't cook or clean.
I actually had to wait until we completely ran out of plates before I felt comfortable suggesting maybe he could wash the stuff he's using
and his Idea of cooking was buying a full chicken and blasting it in the oven and then leaving it to sit in a pool of its own fat for the next few days,
bleugh as a vegetarian this did not sit well with me and I used to gag whenever I had to use the oven
but the best was yet to come. The summer before my final year in college they rented out the other rooms in my apartment to
two guys, an Irish guy who was grand and a Russian named Sergei or Sir Gay as one of my friends named him. I think he's safely back in Russia now
so I'm pretty sure he's unlikely to be reading my blog or else I might have renamed him.
He was strange, He had limp curly hair that looked like he was washing it with cooking oil and maybe he was just shy but he didn't say much but would
just sit in the living room eating spaghetti with brown sauce making me feel edgy with his silence.
I mostly avoided him until the night before we were all due to move out when myself and a friend from back home decided it would be fun and
spontaneous to invite Sergei and the Irish guy out for a few drinks, which quickly turned into a few more drinks until it was me
on my own in a nightclub with Sergei so I did what Drunk Laura does and kissed him. A very silly idea indeed and we went home and I realized
I'd made a terrible mistake so I hid in my room. Clearly he did not feel the same way as he tried to force his way in which freaked me out but also made
me grateful my door automatically locked. The next day he moved out and I hid in my room to avoid him with my friend keeping watch but later that day
he called back to the apartment to apologize, it was horribly uncomfortable. He wouldn't leave until I hugged him and promised to friend him on Facebook,
I lied.
After college I moved away and then home again a few months later to live with my ex (obviously he was my boyfriend at the time or that would be weird) and I
learned that moving in with a 20 year old is pretty stupid ( I was 28) especially when he couldn't cook or clean if his life depended on it. Unless a frozen pizza and a handful of oven wedges qualifies as cooking. I can say I'm glad to no longer share with a man not that it's fair to compare all men to him. Really i should have known better and I wouldn't have found myself spending quite so much time by myself because he wanted to play play station in the living room without me there or needed time to watch many hours of
tv unaccompanied and I don't miss having to wait 45 mins for him to get out of the bathroom in the morning knowing he was just pissing about with his Iphone while making the room smell too disgusting to shower in for at least a half hour after. And just the feeling trapped all the time, that I don;t miss at all and he had the monopoly on worst living situation ever until quite recently.
When I moved again post break up I shared with a girl I didn't know for a little over a year and It was fine in that
we didn't really hang out or interact much but we co-existed peacefully and it worked well enough but
then the bitch had to go off and join the navy of all things so I was left with a house that I couldn't get anyone to even view and had to
start looking at house shares. Half the problem was I'd gotten a job right in town a few months before and really all I wanted was to still be able to walk to work
and to not have to share with loads of people so when I viewed a decent sized house just across the street from where I lived it seemed perfect.
Off I went and signed an 8 month lease and then the fun began. For the sake of niceness let's Just call her C, anyway C was from Carrick on Suir, just down the road from where
we lived in Waterford and It's a town that doesn't have a great reputation. C also had a dog, a boxer pup we're going to call poxy and allegedly this dog stayed outside in our tiny yard except for at night when it slept in C's room. At first it seemed okay if you managed to overlook the lie about poxy, the over excitable pup clearly not being an outdoor dog. She whinged outside the back door until you let her in and then she jumped all over you, sat on you, tried to eat your food, climbed up the back of the couch
and tried to sit on your head. Might have been adorable if she wasn't already huge but I let it go and figured Poxy would probably grow on me. About two weeks after I moved in I started to get a bad feeling about my living situation when I came home from a weekend away to see a giant hole in C's bedroom door. She explained that her ridiculously named boyfriend (now an ex- that I'd never actually spoken to but had seen creeping out in the mornings in his full tracksuit and not the type you wear to do exercise in either) had started to sneakily move his stuff in and she reacted to this by dumping him. He did not take the dumping well and apparently a full screaming match ensued and he punched a hole in her door and then had to be forcibly removed from the house by the guards. To top it off he was from the dodgiest estate in town, when she described what he did for a living it sounded suspiciously like a drug dealer and he had made some death threats to her by text. I just chalked it up to the fact that she was clearly a fucking idiot and let it go.
a week later we decided it might be fun to go out for a few drinks, I should have known better. She mentioned her love of dance festivals a lot
while we had a few glasses of wine and I correctly surmised from this that she'd never met a pill she didn't like, nonetheless we headed into town
and while in the late bar I got talking to a guy while she went and danced with three guys who had great difficulty keeping their shirts on. They eventually got thrown out for this and C and I moved on to another pub. The guys were clearly off their faces on pills so C thought it might be fun to invite them back to ours. I did not concur but try
telling that to your drunk room mate who's just had some pills and let me know how well that goes for you. I had to go to bed after five minutes of getting
home because the story of how 'off his face' one of the guys got annoying the third time he told me and I thought I might just have to punch him.
I think I had to come downstairs another 3 times to tell them to keep the noise down only to find them either dancing or lying shirtless on the floor.
I went to work on one hours sleep and with the resolution to not socialize with C again.
All went okay for a few weeks after that until C decided to go out for ' a few' drinks with one of her man friends.
I'd met a few guys coming and going from the house but I'd surmised from inability to pay bills on time that
she wasn't getting any money from it. The only thing these guys had in common is that they looked like the kinds of men you'd cross
the street to avoid. Anyway the following morning I got up to make breakfast and walked straight through a puddle on the floor.
It took me a moment to identify the ammonia scent as urine and for an awful second I wasn't sure if it was Poxy or one of C's friends.
If you saw her friends you'd wonder too. It was all over the floor and most of the couch and all of the cushions and the back door was open so clearly she'd come home drunk and left the dog in the living room and the dog had reacted to that by peeing everywhere she could reach. When I asked C about this she
was clueless as to how it could have happened but was pretty certain (not 100% sure) that her friends wouldn't have pee'd everywhere.
By now I was more than uncomfortable with my living situation but couldn't contact the landlord because I'd spoken to him twice about minor issues
and he had been horribly aggressive towards me and He was a traveller so he kind of scared me.
If you think that's pretty bad it's not the worst part. Two days later I went home over night and returned just before work to find someone had kicked the lock off the
back door and I was really really angry about this. I tried ringing C but couldn't reach and went to work with the house unlocked, getting angrier as the day progressed but getting no answer to my furious texts. I get home from work to find the front door open and two guys who look like they broke in sitting on our sofa in the dark sipping cans with the heat on full and C wanders in so drunk she's incoherent and I'm practically incandescent with rage but she barely knows her own name so I don't bother arguing.
Once again she has no idea what happened and I'm left making small talk with two scumbags.
I had planned to have it out with her the following day but she's gone hiding at her mum's partially because She drank the rent money and probably avoiding me too and I thought I
can't stay in this place another night so I packed all my stuff and moved home, lease be damned.
Now I live alone and It's not cheap but I know when I walk in something wet on the floor it's definitely not pee and It's my own place.
If it wasn't for the cold and the guy who lives above me that spends hours dancing to trad music alone I'd think it might
be perfect
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