Confined in a small space with a randomly selected roommate, dorm-dwellers frequently find themselves daydreaming about their imagined idyllic life off campus. These daydreams, however, likely don’t include visions of giant spiders, leaky toilets or sharing your house with a mysterious stranger.
Finding somewhere to call home off campus is an adventure. Sifting through countless classifieds and online postings is enough to leave anyone discouraged. However, the adventure of off campus life is just starting once you’ve found a new place to call home.
The first night of living in my new off campus house felt like a scene from Arachnophobia. As I came through the front door, I thought I noticed something scurrying away and quickly turned on the light to investigate. A spider as big as a fist had begun crawling up the wall in an apparent attempt to ambush me from above. My housemate quickly grabbed a rolled-up newspaper and smashed the life out of its obscenely large body. Little did we know, this single spider was a representative of the arachnid army that called our dank basement home. Killing the spider army’s scout served only to anger the troops. The rest of the year was spent squashing giant spiders on an almost daily basis. Before the end of the lease, we had made an adventure out of occasionally curbing the spider’s population. It seems as though our house was not the only residence infested with these uninvited guests. Every one of my friends living off campus had similar stories to share.
Problems such as a spider infestation certainly fall within the gray area of the landlord responsibility spectrum. With the quick turnover of tenants, there often isn’t enough time for a landlord to completely eliminate pests from their properties. However, certain other problems are clearly the responsibility of the landlord. When the second-floor toilet threatens to fall through the ceiling of the first-floor kitchen due to a leaky pipe, any vigilant landlord would quickly rectify the situation. However, when my landlord last year received a concerned phone call after my housemate noticed the kitchen ceiling had begun to develop water stains, the landlord was sure that a quick tightening of the bolts that attach the toilet to the floor would surely fix the leak. Days later, the mysterious brown abstract art on our kitchen ceiling was still growing and our landlord was visibly puzzled. Another tightening of the bolts made no progress. Finally, three weeks after the problem began, our landlord reluctantly decided to remove the toilet and look for a leaky pipe where, not surprisingly, he found that (clean) water had been dripping into our kitchen all along.
My landlord’s repair methods were far from orthodox. Our washing machine would vibrate so much that not only could it be felt and heard on the second floor of the house, but unless it was being babysat during the spin cycle, it would move itself far enough away from the wall to dislodge the drain hose and dump an entire cycle’s soapy water on the floor. My landlord’s fix? Screw some 2×4’s into the floor to keep it in place. When the neighboring house (which was owned by the same landlord) had no running water because their pipes burst, our landlord decided to run a garden hose from inside our laundry room, out our window, across our driveway and into our neighbor’s house until the problem was fixed – which ended up being almost a month.
Although the state of repair of my house last year was certainly aggravating, it was far from the most annoying aspect of living off campus. Since the house we were moving into was intended for four or more people and our group of friends consisted of only three members, we decided to take a calculated risk by living with a fourth (unknown) resident. Having heard plenty of housemate horror stories, we opted to place an ad online and choose the best option from the responses. Using this method, you might as well pick someone up off the street. At first, a new housemate can seem like a reasonable fit for a group with only a few quirks. However, as the year progresses, many hidden qualities that were omitted from pre-lease discussions usually start to rear their ugly heads. Unfortunately, housemates don’t come with a 30-day return policy so you might be left with a dud. Although living off campus provides the opportunity to have one’s own space, many of the same cohabitation issues that on campus students face will occasionally arise in an off campus residence. In retrospect, I would advise being picky with your housemate selection to avoid the countless headache-inducing moments caused by a hasty decision.
This year, I’m calling a small apartment home. Gone are the days of fearing falling through the floor of the bathroom but still present is the mutant spider army. Now I’m left wondering why my upstairs neighbors see it necessary to practice playing their guitars and belting out off-key tunes at 3am. Even though the occasional stampeding upstairs sometimes keep me from sleeping when any normal student would want to be asleep, it’s a much better situation than last year.
Life in the dorms may not be ideal, but life off campus certainly isn’t either. The process of finding a new home is a daunting task and choosing whom to live with is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Although life off campus is certainly an adventure, I could never see myself giving up having my own room to return to the dorms.