Do you think of aesthetic candlelit dinners, pillowfights in pyjamas, hair braiding, picnics and wine-fuelled gossip when someone mentions a girls’ shared house? I’m sorry to burst your bubble but the reality is not quite it.
As an unsuspecting 18-year-old Indian girl who ventured out to study in Australia and started her house-sharing journey in a multicultural household of five, I realised it wasn’t at all what I had in mind. Through my four years of living in four different houses with 11 different housemates and encountering a myriad of unique and challenging problems, I’m lucky to have made it to the other side. So here I am sharing my most memorable (which I’ve learnt doesn’t always mean good) experiences so that another girl in a similar situation is prepared to battle it.
#The only way to rank high on the daredevilness metric is to prove your skills in a cockroach combat
Do you take self defence classes? Martials arts? Kung fu? Karate? Well whatever you thought you needed to protect yourself from the evils of this dangerous world has well and truly been a lie. If you move out of home without prior experience in hand-to-hand combat with the spectres of survival aka cockroaches, then there’s no sugarcoating it, you’re doomed. When I first left home and moved to another continent I thought my biggest problem was going to be homesickness, I have never been more wrong.
My room in one of my first shared houses opened up into the kitchen which at the time didn’t seem like much of a problem other than the occasional early morning whirring of the smoothie blender, announcing my housemate had woken up and decided to jump back onto her fit girl diet.
It was only when I woke up one night to go to the bathroom and almost tripped over a congregation of cockroaches stationed outside my door that went scurrying in all directions, did I realise my chances of survival in this cockroach-infested household were grim. Turned out I was the only one devoid of the experience of the “classic cockroach slipper slam” making me the weakest contender against the battle with the resilient roaches.
Time went by but no amount of repellants and sprays could keep the pests away. I was still topping the cowardice index with my housemates stepping up to take turns being my chaperone to the bathroom and back after dark. During the day I would remind myself that cockroaches were nocturnal creatures and come nightfall, well, God help me. Like Pavlov’s dog, my housemates had become so used to hearing my screams on encountering cockroaches that they would instantaneously reply with a “where?” and run towards me with a slipper in one hand, spray in another. It was then that I realised what true friendship really looked like.
#The anatomy of a diplomatic text
The inner circle comprising three of the five housemates gathered in Ava’s tiny bedroom, sitting around a pot of pasta placed in the middle of her bed, eating directly from it. Despite our ultimate “brokeness”, this new low had not been reached due to our lack of funds (well, only partly) but because all of the five bowls we owned had mysteriously disappeared off the shelves and our best bet was that they had found home in the seldom cleaned corners of Heather’s room.
The urgent meeting had been called to discuss the matter at hand and my skills were needed once again. As a Communications student, resolving internal household conflicts was the only time I’d felt like my degree was of use in the real world, and I wasn’t going to miss my chance to shine.
“Can you type a message asking Heather to wash the bowls she uses but also it shouldn’t seem like you’re telling her what to do at the same time. Do you know what I mean?” Anika asked, slurping on the last bit of spaghetti. I knew exactly what she meant, this was not the first time I was asked to come up with a diplomatic housekeeping circular.
There’s something I learnt fairly early into my house-sharing journey: only one thing can come of telling your housemate that they are doing something wrong and that’s a big fat grudge which they will take to their grave. After unintentionally initiating several cold wars by doing the straightforward thing and being honest with my housemates, I had learnt the dos and don'ts the hard way. But now, I had hacked the perfect way of maintaining the peace of the house, all the while ensuring smooth operations.
The perfect message could be broken down into a few parts:
Step 1: feign ignorance and appear completely oblivious even if you are well- aware of who the guilty one is. So here it went…
“Hey guys, just went to grab a bowl for pasta and realised there aren’t any. Any idea where they might be?”
Step 2: Always use the sandwich method, wrap negative comments in praise.
“I know we always keep things where they belong which is why I was just a bit confused to see the cupboard empty. Maybe someone’s used it and forgotten to wash them. That’s totally okay, I know how busy everyone is, it happens.”
Step 3: Never point fingers, always use a generalised tone.
“It would be great though if WE could all make sure that WE wash the dishes after WE use them because you know…"
Step 4: Emojis, HAHAs and LOLs all the way
“We are broke LOL and can only afford to have so many. (insert smiling face emoji)”
#Having a bottomless pit for a garage doesn’t make it okay to hoard
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch,”...well try telling that to a cash-strapped uni student working a $9-an-hour job scrubbing greasy floors at a fish and chips diner; they wouldn’t think twice before dismissing the all-too-cautious proverb. So when us five girls (four brown, one white) moved into an unfurnished house, we relied on strangers’ generosity to set up a home from scratch, blissfully unaware of the dark side of the seemingly harmless gesture of accepting freebies at the time. It was only when we were almost eight months into our house-sharing journey and Heather brought home a trampoline so big we didn’t know where to fit, that I realised we had crossed over to the other side; we were what people casually referred to as "hoarders" and Heather was hardest hit.
By the end of the year we had more couches in the house than people, and Heather’s “simple” justification of how essential it was to keep a few spare in the garage so we could change the arrangement every season, made us other overseas students think that maybe that’s how it was done in Australia, turns out it was just Heather. The real problem arose when a series of events (read: ugly fights) led to everyone deciding to split paths and move out.
For some Godforsaken reason, I was hoping till the very end for things to get sorted out which didn’t happen. What did happen though was that I was the last person left in the house along with my other housemate Anika and it was only when we lifted the shutter to the seldomly used garage did we realise we were in deep shit.
Our eyes met the endless piles of hoarded items: the fake antique bookshelf which failed to claim a permanent spot in the living room because collectively we couldn’t find more than five books to put in there; the remnants of the washing machine Heather had us smash with metal rods to break free the drum to use as a fire pit; the gigantic garden bed which had only yielded about a dozen spinach leaves; and of course an assortment of couches for all seasons.
To make matters worse, none of the items were in their original condition and instead the garage was now a self-sustaining ecosystem, housing various families of spiders, lizards, snails and cockroaches. Several frantic calls to the waste collectors, a deep garage cleanse, sore and aching joints and multiple meltdowns later there was only one thing going through my mind – turns out there really were no free lunches.
#Excelling your way out of problems is the only way to go
What would you do if you suddenly found yourself on the verge of homelessness, the last thing that could go wrong in your chaotic, tumultuous life? Some would say therapy would be a good place to start. I thought it was Microsoft Excel.
When two of our housemates suddenly decided to up and leave, Anika and I were left to pay the rent for the entire house, which we realised was running our banks dry. We had no other option but to vacate. We handed in our two week notice without so much as an inkling of an idea as to where we would live when the two weeks were up.
It was when our life seemed like it was going to shit and everything was falling apart I told Anika not to worry and disappeared into my room for a few hours and returned with the solution.
“We found a place?!” Anika exclaimed. Okay maybe not the solution. “No but I made an Excel sheet- ‘Our guide to homelessness prevention’,” I said to her. Agreed our life was a mess and an Excel sheet didn’t solve the problem but at least it was an organised mess now.
I listed all the thirteen properties we had applied for and inspected, noting down the pros, cons and our realistic chances of securing the place. At least with the spreadsheet, now I knew with much clarity which houses were too expensive and totally out of our budget.
When we were left with just two days until we set up camp under the bridge, we received a call. It was from the property manager from one of the three properties not coloured red on the spreadsheet. We had gotten a place.
It wasn’t outrightly clear what percentage of our success was linked to the Excel sheet but judging by the printed spreadsheets of grocery lists, diet charts, household chores taped to our fridge from that day onwards, I knew I had myself an Excel convert.
*All names have been changed to protect their privacy*
