Enjoy the housing panic...

Apparently, everyone still seems to be in a supreme panic about finding a house for next year - according to my Facebook newsfeed, anyway. Even once you’ve sorted out who your new housemates will be, you’re then faced with the hours looking online for acceptable houses, leading to excessive and often pointless viewings, and finally resulting in the ultimate worry, that ‘Oh my God, next year I will actually have to live in a cardboard box’. However, I’m here to say – chill out. Everything will sort itself out in the end. And, personally, I think that’s the easiest part when it comes to moving home. The worst bit is having people round to view your current house – I literally shudder every time I hear a knock on the door.

I don’t even know where to start. Trying to tidy-up an entire house in five minutes is possibly the most depressing thing I’ve ever done. First step is to shove as many clothes as possible into the wardrobe, reminding yourself of what colour your bedroom carpet is; even though you know that the second the landlord leaves it will somehow, magically, end up right back on the floor. Then you move downstairs to try and handle the living-room, wondering how to deal with the tea-stained army of free mugs you took from Freshers’ Fair. You decide to place them in the cupboard; no point cleaning mugs that are just going to have tea in again, right?

Next there’s the frantic rush for the air freshener to try and rid the living room of the stale smell of alcohol and cigarettes. This is soon followed by great panic, when you realise that Tesco’s basic air freshener actually makes the room smell even worse than it did before; somehow it still doesn’t cover up the original smell. You stop to ponder this mystery, and then realise you still have a very smelly room. Solution: You just have to hope your landlord’s sense of smell is as bad as his ability to make conversation. Small talk he can manage and that’s fine; it’s when there’s an hour between viewings and he decides to have a little hangout time in the house in between. You just want to watch Deal or No Deal in peace, and yet you find yourself discussing the relative merits of upstairs versus downstairs bathrooms. For an hour. An hour of your life that you will never get back.

See? This side of the house-move is clearly more stressful; so if you’re still worrying about finding the perfect house, then just relax. It will happen. And if it doesn’t, then you’re only there for a year – easy! Just remember: Once you’re there enjoy the freedom while you can; before you know it, you’ll be the one faced with hoards of panicky house-hunters and a horrifically messy house and the whole cycle will begin again. Yet, that almost seems romantic, in a way. The annoyers become the annoyed, and we all have our own role to play, as horrible as it may be.

Perhaps we all just need to get over it, and stop complaining. I think the best thing to do, for both those moving in and those moving out, is to simply embrace the hassles of student moving – the chances are we’ll never be able to live this way again. So, I’m just trying to be glad that we don’t have to worry about taxes and mortgages (for now…), and reckon we should just pick a house, relax, and enjoy the student lifestyle while we still can. If missing Noel Edmund’s brilliance once in a while is the price to pay, then so be it. It’s totally worth it.