Accommodation

I have my accommodation sorted for next year. The original plan was to share a townhouse on the university campus with my boyfriend, but then he told me how much rent cost these days and I changed my mind. Sorry.

It’s been four years since I’ve paid rent – this year my rent is free because I’m on rural placement, and for three years before that I worked as a Residential Coordinator on campus and hence rent was incredibly cheap. But I remember how much I struggled to pay rent as well as buy food every week back in the day when I paid full rent on campus. Taking into account the fact that rent has increased alarmingly each year since then and Youth Allowance has not, I was terrified at the thought of trying all that again.

And so my little sister, who has an actual job and lives all on her own, offered to take me in. We came to an agreement in a series of long phone calls interjected frequently with important information such as “my dog is so cute! She’s laying down” and “so is my dog! He barked at somebody today”. The agreement is fairly simple ... I just have to pay a bit of rent and make a lot of food.

Mum thinks it’s a terrific idea. She hasn’t said so but I know it’s because 1 – I can ‘keep an eye on’ little sister and 2 – I won’t be living with a boy. Little sister thinks it’s a great idea because 1 – Food, 2 – Oh my God we can share clothes, and 3 – I think she’s sick of living alone.

There are many potential disasters, and I know this, but it still seems like a pretty good option because we get along really well in between fights, and also I’m on Youth Allowance and she isn't charging too much rent.

Things look all too simple at the moment because both of us are living alone and have forgotten how annoying house mates can be. But I have been responsible and produced this list of possible cons:

1. Little sister’s house is miles away from uni. This will probably start to annoy me after a few weeks or months.

2. “Sharing clothes” means different things to different people. Little Sister is already prone to sneaking items out of my wardrobe and not returning them for months or years, so I hope this new arrangement means that she’ll return them sooner because they’re legitimately borrowed.

3. I don’t particularly enjoy cooking, especially “real food” such as is expected at dinner time. I do, on the other hand, excel at making cakes and biscuits, which I enthusiastically pointed out. Little sister’s reply was “um ... we’re going to ... we kind of need to eat vegetables sometimes”.

4. I’m going to have to hide my chocolate stash REALLY WELL.

5. I'm adding "arguments over the bathroom" because this is inevitable.

Stay tuned next year to hear how we get on!