“Will I ever find a room for a flexible length stay without having to give up guarantees of safety or quality?!”
This was a question I found myself asking many times during a year where I found myself living in four different houses. It was through this experience that I learnt just how common scams and unsafe accommodation are in cities (especially when you don’t have a large budget), how useful a local connection can be and a lot about what shared living at its best has to offer. I was lucky, I realise that my experience was nothing compared to some of the horror stories I’ve since heard, but it was a real (and expensive) eye opener for me and made me even more determined to help find an alternative.
Room 1: Unsafe home and unhelpful landlord
Let’s start at the beginning of my year. Room 1 was by far the worst experience that I had and was the only situation where I felt unsafe. I found Room 1 on a popular website for finding rooms. Since this experience I’ve spoken to a lot of people who, like me, weren’t living in the country when they had to find a room, it seems that it’s common to find that a landlord who is accommodating over the phone can quickly change once the deposit and rent have been paid.
The live out landlord had posted a room slightly out of my price range and when I messaged her about it she offered me a cheaper room on the ground floor of the house. She was decorating it so I didn’t get to see it before I moved in, but I did see the rest of the house and chat to the other housemates online and it all seemed OK, so (perhaps naively) I paid my deposit and waited to move in. In terms of the room itself, I got lucky, despite not having seen it, it was lovely and so were the communal spaces. The tenant who moved into the more expensive room upstairs wasn’t so lucky, spending his first few weeks trying to get broken sockets and windows in his room fixed.
For the first few months I had few issues. One of the other housemates fell out with the landlord and was asked to leave, but we all put this down to a clash in personalities and thought little of it. The landlord then informed us that she was going to go traveling for a few months. To summarise a long and stressful next few months, we subsequently had many issues. Our deposits had not been protected, the landlords cats caused damage to the house and our personal property, and the landlord’s son moved into the garage bringing with him late night parties, drugs and threatening behaviour. We spent a few weeks going back and forth with the landlord trying to resolve the issues, but whilst I was on a trip to Canada the situation escalated, the other tenants feeling unsafe felt they had no option but to move out, and I was left having to try and find somewhere new to live from halfway around the world.
Room 2: I’m lucky I knew someone local!
Onto room 2 of which I have no complaints! I was lucky that my friend had a spare bedroom that was available for a month. It was a great room in a well-connected location with a friend who was lovely. My experience made me realise how valuable it is to know people in the city you’re living in, without that I would have been stuck!
Room 3: Subletting in December with snow and no central heating
Unfortunately room 2 was only available for a month but after spending hours trawling through the 100s of scams in Facebook groups I found a room to sublet that was cheap and well located. Rooms go quickly in London so I went to visit the property almost immediately and the woman I would be subletting from needed an answer straight away. Desperate to find somewhere I agreed to sublet it and sent her a deposit. The room was nice and the housemates were great. Unfortunately, with just a 5 minute viewing and no photos to go off of I hadn’t noticed that there was no central heating. It wasn’t until it started to snow in London and I turned on the electric heater in the bedroom that I realised it was broken. It was a cold few months in that house and showers weren’t my favourite part of my day.
Room 4: A unique shared living experience
I was lucky that when my chilly sublet came to an end and it wasn’t able to be renewed I had another friend with a room available for my last 2 months in London. Yet again I realised what a difference it makes to know people in the area you live in, and how amazing it is when you live in a house with people who you get on well with. We bought food together in bulk and there was a communal fruit and veg bowl which we all took turns filling up. After many long commutes home I loved finding a meal already cooked in the kitchen for us all to share. One of my housemates also had an interest in housing and introduced me to architectural projects in France that I would probably have never heard about otherwise. This was an amazing experience of shared living that made me realise that living together can mean more than just sharing a bathroom and kitchen, it can be sharing knowledge and meals and having someone to talk to and laugh with about that shared experience of the particularly rowdy commute that morning.