Friday’s On The Move Again
I’m in the process of moving home again. I’ve moved six times since I’ve been in Edinburgh and I have to admit I’m getting thoroughly fed up with it. At the moment I’m just looking for a room so I’ll probably be on the move again before long. Yaaawwnn….
We had to move out of our last flat rather quickly as a water leak behind the walls we reported in January was neglected by the letting agency until, well now really, and in the meantime the walls have rotted and the floors have buckled. So they now have to rip the whole lot out and start again. Idiots.
Anyway. It’s been on my mind unsurprisingly so I thought it would do as a Friday Five theme. Everybody lives somewhere so we must have some experiences we can share or advice to offer each other. Hopefully anyway. Remember to come out of the woodwork if you’ve been lurking!
1. Have you got any disaster stories about your homes to tell?
2. What is the most important quality I should look for in a new housemate?
3. Have you ever lived with any complete weirdos?
4. What’s the most unusual place you’ve stayed – even if only for a night?
5. Describe your dream home.
1. Have you got any disaster stories about your homes to tell?
at uni my friends were living in an old manions type house, there were 14 of them and they really just liked the look of the house so they rented it without thinking about the condition of it at all. within a week of moving they discovered that the sinks took hours to drain, the railing on the stairs was unsteady, if more than three things were plugged in at the same time they would blow a fuse and their creepy neighbor had a view into their bathroom.
2. What is the most important quality I should look for in a new housemate?
someone who isnt secretly in love with you and has not dedicated their entire closet to pictures of you.
3. Have you ever lived with any complete weirdos?
one of my housemates was nocturnal. he would work in the garage under my bed room drilling and welding between the hours of 2 am and 6 am. and the other only ate tuna and peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast
4. What’s the most unusual place you’ve stayed – even if only for a night?
while traveling a group of us stayed in an abandoned freight railroad car outside of portland oregon for a couple nights
5. Describe your dream home.
there would be a dining room where the floor is a pool, only a couple inches deep. to get to the table (which is on a glass platform) you have to walk on a series of clear walkways that move and are illuminated to show you the path. if someone pisses me off during dinner i can move the pathways and make them guess.
1. Have you got any disaster stories about your homes to tell?
Mains pipe bursting – IN the house. That was us moved out for 5 months…
2. What is the most important quality I should look for in a new housemate?
Low levels of flatulence.
3. Have you ever lived with any complete weirdos?
Yes – a Fifer.
4. What’s the most unusual place you’ve stayed – even if only for a night?
Doorstep of my old student digs. Damn keyhole kept moving.
5. Describe your dream home.
Roomy, on the beach, well stocked bar, huge sound system. Lots of cats wandering about. Oh, and red pandas.
1. My father (a plumber) was instructing me on fitting a new part to my boiler the evening before leaving for the US for a month. In answer to repeated questions like “Are you sure I don’t need to turn the water off?” he repeatedly said no until I removed the part and caused a large flood.
2. Doesn’t complain when you’re a bit useless
3. Oh yes. I win all the weirdo competitions ever (I defy anyone to beat this guy.) In my first year of Uni, I shared a flat with James the South African who did the following:
a) Laughed INCREDIBLY loudly at any comedy show on TV regardless of whether he got the jokes.
b) Only ate fried burgers which he fried in the same pan for what seemed like a whole year without washing.
c) Thought apartheid was a good thing.
d) Had massive hair which caused the world largest shower monsters.
e) Was generally annoying and anit-social (and a bit pervy according to every girl who ever entered our flat.)
This is all bad but takes no prizes I agree. However, a few years later he was noticed in The Metro being sent to prison for six months, three for spying on his current, female flatmates in the shower with a webcam and three for having a large collection of kiddy porn on his computer. His identity was confirmed by a friend who was temping at the prison at the time and he was deported upon release. So it’s possible there is footage of me in the shower on the internet somewhere, I recommend caution when browsing…
4. Hurling Pot Farm. Was a perfectly normal farm but what an ace name.
5. I actually quite like where I live now.
1. When I was 8 our apartment burned down and we had to find another place quickly. The new flat, unbeknownst to us, was crawling with cockroaches. Over the course of our year there, they would come out of the tap when you ran the bath and fall out of the cupboards when opened. My mother would pull my brother’s and my bed away from the wall each night before we slept and spray a circle of roach repellent around each bed.
Turned out a wacky lady lived two floors above and had not thrown out her trash for months.
2. A good music collection.
3. See question 1. That’s close enough in proximity.
4. On a cot in an attic in a friend’s house. Creepy and claustrophobic.
5. I’m pretty lucky to say the one I live in now. It’s comfortable, charming, spacious and located in a lovely, rural VT town. I’m dying here.
1. too many to tell, bathrooms flooding, pipes blocking up and filling my garden with raw sewage, owning a house sucks sometimes
2. don’t live with a friend if you want to remain friends
3. only one, he liked computer games and Rangers, he barely left his bedroom
4. I accidently stayed in a homeless hostel in Dundee, that was a FUN night
5. It would need to be somewhere secluded, but still close enough to a big city, as I’d get bored living in the country
Peenko, I presume you don’t mean Space Rangers such as Buzz Lightyear of Star Command either?
1. my 1st flat was a mare; the roof leaked, the walls were paper thin and would cave in if the door hit them or you leant on them, the landlord used to let himself in whenever he wanted, but wouldn’t fix anything, ie the broken toilet, for which he told us to ask next door if we could use theirs. dickhead. i think it just went on fire too
2. good levels of hygiene
3. In uni halls I had a flatmate who kept stealing girls pants from the laundry room. He hung them on his wall like a wee banner
4. I stayed in a hostel that turned out to just be the home of 2 very creepy old folk. they made us turn the lights out and go to bed at 10.
5. somewhere with a big garden and no neighbours
Steve – sadly not, he was more of the generic hun type
1. Have you got any disaster stories about your homes to tell?
Apartment dorms at college with 6 girls per apartment and one bathroom, still not so bad. Another apartment looked clean but someone in the complex had issues because whenever we turned on the lights we heard roaches scurrying to hide, plus we once caught some neighbors watching us sleep (must remember to lock those doors). As a single woman in Colorado, there was a peeping tom harassing the women in the complex.
Big disaster when selling homes in Colorado and not getting out what we put into them, but hey, we’re still alive and happy.
2. What is the most important quality I should look for in a new housemate?
Sanity, financial capability? So many qualities, really, to look for.
3. Have you ever lived with any complete weirdos?
No real disasters. One nice young woman constantly burned things on the stove, so that I felt I needed to check on her cooking to avoid the apartment starting on fire… Lots of drama in the days of living with multiple female roommates with conflicting personalities.
4. What’s the most unusual place you’ve stayed – even if only for a night?
Overnight at the home in Idaho that used to be owned by my grandparents but was no longer owned by them. We sort of knew the family that bought the place and were there because my parents couldn’t get us due to massive snow on the divide where we lived. We reached home the next day by truck/snowmobile.
5. Describe your dream home.
Just let me be comfy with my family, that’s my dream home.
1. No, I’ve been really lucky. Except for finding a frelling bedbug last month. Stupid frelling bedbug.
2. Do you like them? And are you comfortable around them Everything else is negotiable, well, kind of (I mean if they’re a nudist and you’re not comfortable with that then there will be issues) but chances are if you find someone and they click you’ll be able to live with that person.
Well, maybe good credit.
And will they wash the dishes, and fill up the goddamn Britta pitcher. Or are they the kind of person who will get upset if you don’t fill up the goddamn Britta pitcher.
3. No, see my answer to number 2.
4. many a strange bed — the strangest being a lofted full sized bed that required a ladder to get up to.
5. Some place with room for lots of books that is surrounded by trees but still in the middle of a major city.
1. One of mine nearly sank beneath the Thames, does that count?
2. The sort of person always likely to have milk and bread around to pilfer.
3. Have you ever met Mrs. Toad?
4. Possibly when I was having a picnic on the beach on Cape Cod, and some old guy came up to us and started talking about how he was acting as caretaker for his friend’s mansion while he was away. The upshoot? He let me and the two girls I was with crash there for the night. And when I say mansion, I really really mean mansion. That whole night was most surreal.
5. I kinda like the one I’m in now, although an old industrial space where we can record and have proper gigs and so on would be pretty awesome. You can keep yer cottages in the country – not interested!
Actually, I credit my years of youthful itinerance as being one of the key reasons I am so into music. No matter how little I had with me, how little I’d unpacked or how little time I intended staying somewhere: stereo on + gin and tonic = home!
1) Yes, I bought one, then when I wanted to move I couldn’t. So now my poor bloody wife has to commute for three hours a day to get to work. That happened a three weeks ago so the pain is still a bit fresh.
2) Tit, and a tendency not to sue you.
3) I lived with a chap who watched porn recreationally. I would come home and he would be sitting, enjoying his dinner and watching a porn film as nonchalantly as if it was Eastenders. It used to make women I brought home a shade uncomfortable. For whatever reason.
4) I once pulled a girl, and got stuck in my best mates room. She had a boyfriend and we were watching a film in there, all her flatmates came home so we either had to let them know or go to sleep there.
5) I never really care about the houses I live in. More the people and the location.
1. My last student house had problems with the roof that led to my bed being completely soaked with water coming through when the wind blew a certain way. Looking back, my room was bloody enormous and I really should have been able to find somewhere that didn’t drip. Not as bad as when, aged 7 (and about four weeks before we were due to move, having exchanged contracts already) my bedroom ceiling fell on my head in the middle of the night.
2. I have a different and more specific answer to this that I will keep to myself so, for now, would say that I’ve never lived alone and do rather like the idea.
3. Not off the scale, but (back to last student house) one guy lived about 20 miles from the university and had his mum come in to clean for him once a week, couldn’t cook anything at all, ever (not even frozen ‘put it in the oven’ stuff) (I’m not exaggerating), never did any housework at all ever, would set the alarm for 3am if he noticed a film on which had a beach boys film in the soundtrack, had all of Home and Away on video (this was the late 80s and it hadn’t been on for so long but still – every episode of a continuing soap opera that was on every day) and eventually moved to Japan and joined a Monkee’s tribute band.
4. I went night-oreinteering once, as a teenager, got completely and hopelessly lost, ended up being drawn through the woods to a thatched cottage that was on fire which was, at least, a warm place to lie beside the road.
5. Books.