Student house search season is nearly at an end, which means for the students who have opted to go into private houses, you’ll soon be collecting your keys to your new home. House hunting may have been hard or stressful at times, but the next big decision is selecting your bedroom.
Some groups may have decided which rooms as they went around houses the second time, which is great and very organised and probably saves a lot of worry and tension! But if you haven’t, how do you decide?
Here are some factors to bear in mind:
- Ground Floor bedroom
- Cons: noisy street possibly, answering the door everytime it goes, worrying about burglars (which is quite rare in Aberystwyth but we know, it’s still a worry!)
- Pros: usually a more spacious room (ground floors tend to have more space), most sociable room – kitchen and lounge are usually on the ground floor so everyone pops in to say hi
- Top Floor room
- Cons: usually smaller, all those stairs, does the WiFi even reach here, might be colder?
- Pros: no drunken housemates walking past, the rooms usually have more character, you may even have a view
- Next to the Bathroom room
- Cons: Singing house mates… noise from the water pipes
- Pros: not far to go to nip to the loo, and possibly getting in first every day!
- The Small Room
- Cons: Small – so no storage space (if you have this room, bagsy yourself some storage somewhere else in the house)
- Pros: Cosy and usually the warmest room in the house.
- The Big Room
- Cons: can feel empty and lacking character, plus much harder to heat
- Pros: being able to swing a cat around a room now larger than what you had in University (or most likely)
Maybe you already know which room you want, or which room you’d be happy to live in but how do you decide as a group? Here are some options we’d recommend:
- Good old fashioned discussion – you never know, someone might really want that top floor room, someone else might want the cosy small room, so after a good chat and a cuppa the rooms might have sorted themselves out without any arguments.
- Picking straws/out of a hat – you could do this by numbering the rooms and straws/paper and just go in for the lucky dip. It’s a fair way to delegate the rooms and no one can argue with a hat.
- Sorting out the rooms by price – so long as the landlord or letting agent get their rent, they won’t really care how the rooms are split. Every house usually have a small room and a massive room, so if it works out better than one would prefer to pay more or less for their room that year, then there’s no problem!
- First come first serve – the race of who can get the keys first, who arrives in town first to get their bedroom and lock the door behind them. Not the most democratic way but perhaps no one is fussed about where their room is.