Special Post #7: Accommodation, Part 5 - Zion

This is the 5th and final part of the now infamous multi-part series about the quest for a place to live in my second year at the University of Surrey. The story continues where it left off with me and Josh looking at houses early on Wednesday…

Here’s the map from the previous post so you can follow along:

This is a map of all the houses we went to visit that day. Houses in visited order: top right in cluster of 3; top left in cluster of 3; far left; bottom left in cluster of 3; far right.

The second house was about 10 minutes walk from the first. It was on a quite residential road and was even offset from the road so as to include space to park a car.

Inside the house was really great. Downstairs had one bedroom (the largest in the house), a small-ish lounge with room for 5 people, a table and a TV. The back of the house had a long kitchen with the bathroom off it. Let me explain:

This is the ground floor. The toilet has a bath and shower. The kitchen is new (2008) and therefore has new hobs, cooker, fridges (yup, there are two!) and freezers (yup, that’s two as well).

 

The second bedroom is apparently the smallest, because it also has the water tank in it, otherwise all the bedrooms upstairs are of a similar size. They all have a washbasin in them, which I thought was a useful addition.

Me and Josh loved it! We both thought it was a great house, great location, good price, and an overall good place to live. After we’d viewed it I immediately rang the landlord to express our interest. Sadly, yet again, someone had beaten us to it…

Only kidding! We’d got it! He said that we had to pay our deposits before we were guaranteed the house, but that we were the first to say we wanted it. The problem now was that only me and Josh had seen the house. We can’t guarantee that the others would like it and we certainly couldn’t ask them to pay a deposit on a house they hadn’t even seen!

Either way, me and Josh returned to the university (a 20 minute walk) to get lunch. Then, at 2pm, we met up with our fellow housemates to tell them the good news.

The plan for the afternoon was to look at a few more houses (just in case) and then show everyone else the good house. We also had a “back-up” house that was in town and was quite expensive, so we only considered it as a last resort if we didn’t like any of the other houses.

The next house was in Park Barn, which has a reputation for being a rough area. It was an alright house, but it was a long way from the uni and the current owners had trashed it somewhat.

After a short walk we arrived at yet another house, this time only a stone’s throw away from the house me and Josh had loved that morning. This house was almost identical to that house, but with a few small differences:

1. It had been decorated in lighter colours which made it feel more homely
2. The lounge was larger and squarer
3. The kitchen wasn’t as modern
4. It had two showers and two toilets, but no washbasins in rooms

Overall, everyone really, really liked it. So much in fact that I rang the landlord to show our interest. Unfortunately, the house had already gone less than an hour before we called. So now all me and Josh could hope for was that everyone would really like the house we’d seen that morning.

We stepped in the front door and everyone was shown round like me and Josh had been that morning. They loved it! Even more than the last house because the kitchen was better and the rooms were slightly bigger. So I rang the landlord to confirm that we were still at the top of the pile, and we were!

That evening we all got an email asking for a deposit for the house.

A few days later, 12th March, we’d all paid and we finally got confirmation that we had the house! All we need to do now is to sign the contract, which we’re doing after Easter.

WOW! That’s it. Your up to date. Only 16 days late. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about this journey as much as I have writing it and experiencing it.

PS why was the post called Zion? See if you can guess and I’ll tell you the answer in the next blog post.