It’s a new year: you’ve managed to find some decent friends and rallied them together to find a flat. Fuck, now what? The trials and tribulations of flatting can rip apart the closest of friends, or bind you together closer than any life-or-death experience could. It can bring you to your knees in your darkest hour. Your flatmate’s dishes have been left undone for 12 consecutive days, they have taken to storing their bike in the lounge, and there’s an object I’d rather not look at left in the bathroom. Conversely, it can be a place of sunshine and rainbows, a student’s utopia of friends, drinking, and late nights spent talking in the kitchen with the lights off.

It’s not up to chance which way this goes. Instead, it’s up to careful decision making and communication with your flatmates, to make sure that your flat can be a shining sanctuary in the dark shadowy forest that university can be.

These are a collection of things I’ve learned from my flat and hope you can use to smooth over the creases of your intra-flat drama and the fissures that will inevitably form.

COUPLES ARE A BIG NO-NO.

Do your very best to avoid flatting with a couple. You may think two people in one room is an easy way to reduce rent, and while this is right, be warned. The horrors of living with a couple follow. These include but are not limited to:

⁃ Them tickling each other on your bed when studying in your room.

⁃ Baby talk when trying to decide what to cook for dinner.

⁃ Weird back-and-forth’s about decisions. “I’ll do it if you do”.. “no, I want to only if you want to”.

And when the relationship begins to break down:

⁃ Long periods of awkward silence in the lounge.

⁃ Them avoiding each other as much as possible.

⁃ Flirting with the other flatmates.

All these wonderful side effects can easily be avoided by NOT FLATTING WITH A COUPLE.

FRIDGE POLICE

I have, no joke, found mould colonies growing in month old curry. And mandarins so far gone you could barely tell what fruit they were. You can avoid this easily by regularly going through the fridge. It’s not that hard guys!

A list of other behaviours that deserve to be regulated or punished:

⁃ Slurping

⁃ Farting

⁃ Leaving skid marks in the toilet

⁃ Noisy sex

⁃ Using my toothbrush

⁃ Eating my food

CHORES

When we all moved into my flat, we decided that the chores would be done through an honour system. And everyone should just take initiative and do the chores as they are needed. If something needs to be done, just do it. THIS BARELY EVER WORKS. If you’re a shit cunt: you’ll slack off. If you give a shit: you’ll end up doing the same chores over and over. In the same way free market capitalism tends towards exploitation and monopolies, leaving chores to the honour system leads to dishes left undone and toilets left uncleaned. A chore list solves these issues with minimal effort. This gives clear accountability so everyone knows what to do and when it should be done by.

We also decided if the job isn’t done by Sunday (without a reason), you owe the flat a round of drinks at the pub, so it’s not all doom and gloom.

SPLITWISE

Get the app. It saves you so much hassle trying to figure out how much your mates owe you when you pay for the grocery shop. Or the weed.

FRIENDS

If you’re flatting with friends you risk the chance of your flat becoming an echo chamber of repeated inside jokes, and hyper-specific discussions that make sense only in the micro-ecosystem of your flat. In this case, I’m sorry to say, you are losing touch with the modern times.

Having friends outside of this niche community is an avenue to socialise outside of the flat, giving you a break from the people you see every single day, and allowing you to escape the flats sphere of influence.  This will save you from the fate of getting out of touch, making sure you don’t lose track of social trends, and the norms in the shadowy mists of a close-knit flat.

A flat is a communal effort. It’s a mini reflection of society. All of its inhabitants need to strive to make It work. When it comes down to it, you and your flatmates are going to have to learn to compromise, communicate, and drop the passive aggressive tone in the note you leave on the bench. The only way your friendships are going to emerge from this flat intact is if you can call one another out on your messiness, take it on board when your flatmate asks you to stop forgetting to flush the toilet, and learn to communicate in a healthy way.