I have never had much to do with the property market to date. Aside from my brief jaunt into the field when I was tasked with finding a group of us a home to live after our time of campus ran out I am pretty fresh and new to the business.

The market around here is a brutal one, I mean, it’s brutal anywhere but being a University town it makes it just that little bit harder. 80% of the houses available are student lets i.e they were once lovely three bed detached but are now 6 bed roomed frankenstein creations. I kind of wanted to keep away from the student market this time round because it pisses me off that we pay 3x the amount of money for a house that is regular size but with 2 extra rooms tacked on. I don’t joke much about the ‘tacking on’ either, parts of our attic are held together with tape..hence the exploding water fest that was Christmas last year.

The private market have it all worked out though, they rank students lower than incontinent dogs on the ‘things we don’t want in the house’ scale. I don’t blame them, if I was a landlord I wouldn’t want students in my house simply because the smell of ramen noodles alone would take years to get out of the upholstery..

I say much of this in jest, I knew when looking at private housing they wouldn’t want students, and that passing the credit checks alone would have made me want to run for the hills (I don’t have any credit for them to check..it makes me evil in their eyes!). It’s just a shame I saw the *perfect* house for the perfect rental price already..

This post was brought you by the desperate need to avoid finding two new housemates after current ones graduate, after the disaster of ‘lets get stabby and burn some things’ housemate #1 and ‘how many people does it take to make it an orgy’ housemate #2 I think I should have as little to do with the selection process as is humanly possible.
Although perhaps I can run psychometric tests on all newcomers, in the name of my degree..

You know when you spend so much time in one place you stop ’seeing’ things around you. I mean noticing things like items of furniture, paintings etc. Does that ever happen to anyone else?

This evening I looked around and realised two things which shocked me just a little. The first is, 5 months later, we still have the very bright and very noticeble birthday banner up on the wall which myself and several friends designed for the end of year birthday/exams party we had. It’s not as though it’s hidden away in the corner of the room somewhere, it’s about 3ft high by 5ft wide and it’s directly in-front of where I sit to eat each evening but I just never see it anymore.
New people into the house always inquire about it and then give little funny looks when they realise it will probably be up there until the day we move out. It’s kind of become house tradition now, one which everyone is reluctant to break.

If you think that’s bad then how about the Christmas decorations still being up? Ok so 2 little hanging stars aren’t exactly a dead tree in the corner, or some flashing lights but they still somehow ended up staying and it’s a little late to do anything about it now. I really didn’t want to become one of ‘those’ people, you know the type..the ones who like to leave Christmas reminders dotted around because they love it so. I fall very much into the festive hate category.

I also think we might have an inflatable ghost from last Halloween stuffed behind a door somewhere…It’s a good job we don’t have Thanksgiving here or we might also have a live turky running round the house because someone just…forgot about it..

Last night at the store I found:

It made the 8 year old in me giggle anyway..