Another post in the on-going series about all things to do with where I lay my head at night. It’s also part 6 in the almost-over-series about the week following my last second year exam, which was also coincidentally my last week in my first ever house, and the first few days in my second house!
In a post a couple of months ago I talked about my plans for living on my placement year. It was a hard decision to live in Guildford, but Basingstoke is only an hour’s commute away and getting to spend another year close to all my friends at university had to be done.
Josh had been asked by his best friend, Chris Nash, to live with him next year. Together with Chris Nash’s housemate Chris Ashton and me, we had enough people to get a house. Ashton and Nash looked at houses and eventually found one they liked. Josh and I looked around and agreed to get it. It was really exciting to know that I had a house with Josh next year, but even better given how great the house was!
Since then we’ve got together once as a house to meet the estate agent and pay the holding deposit for the house.
The tenancy for the house didn’t start until the middle of August, so between the end of June and mid-August I had nowhere to live. At first I was going to go home for 6 weeks and commute to Basingstoke from London, but then a few of my friends told me that they had a spare room I could use…
Frankie and Claire from MAD TV had a room in their house that they hadn’t found a housemate for yet. They needed a 5th housemate for the whole year and I was their first choice. At first I declined living with them for the whole year because I was already planning on living with Josh, but I told them I could live there for 6 weeks over summer. This made the commute a lot easier, and meant being in Guildford for Guilfest, Phil’s graduation and other things. It was a done deal, all they needed to do was find someone to take the other 11 months and I could pay them back the months rent.
The reason I declined to live there for the whole year at first was because I didn’t want to let Chris and Josh down by backing out of the house deal now. The Thorpe Park trip last week was meant to be a time to meet Chris and Chris and find out more about the people I was going to live with for a year. In the end, Chris Ashton had to cancel and Chris Nash spent the whole day with Josh and Jess and not everyone else. That was the chance I had to get to know my future housemates before living with them. That evening I did a lot of thinking.
Since my other friends still hadn’t found a 5th housemate, and I still hadn’t signed a contract for the house, I was in a position to make a decision. Do I stick to my guns and live with Josh in a great house, but possibly not get on with Chris and Chris? Or do I live with Frankie and Claire, who I know I get on with? There were other factors that went into the decision that aren’t fair to go into on a public blog, but it’s fair to say it wasn’t easy, at all.
A month prior I had to make the same decision when Claire and Frankie asked me for the first time. Since then I’d kind of been regretting saying no, but at the same time knew it was the only choice without a lot of hassle which I couldn’t deal with on top of my exams. But a month later, with a fresh head and new information, I changed my mind.
I chose to do what I wanted to do rather than what I had to do to please other people. I told Josh the following day and he understood that I’d been thinking about it for a while.
If you’ve managed to follow all of that then well done, it was a spaghetti of a situation and I’m still untangling the ends. but the long and the short of it is that I’m living with a different set of people next year in a different house. I’ll write a post very soon about them all and the house, but tomorrow is another post about my last week in Zion :) So much happening…. phew!
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