My freshman year of college, I lived in a white brick walled room with a girl I first met the day we moved in together. We lived together for two semesters and as far as freshman roommate relationships go, we had a good one. I won’t say I loved living in on-campus housing, but it definitely wasn’t the horror story a lot of Youtube vloggers make it out to be. (Aside from the ghost that haunted our room, but that’s a story for another time.)
I moved off campus into an apartment 25 minutes away my sophomore year and due to restrictions on campus, most of my friends were still required to live on campus. I had no one to ask when I first moved in in August, so here’s a few things I wish I knew about living in an apartment for the first time.
1. Home Décor is EXPENSIVE
I won’t get into the mess that was trying to find an apartment that fit my list of requirements that my roommate agreed with, but amidst the commotion, I had started pinning home decor to Pinterest boards and spending too much time in the artificial plant aisle of Marshalls. The problem in this was that I hadn’t realized how much money home decor actually was and how little retail and on campus jobs actually pay. Why do artificial trees cost $50? Why are all the cute signs $40 each? I’ve yet to find the answers, but for now a string of clearance Christmas lights across the living room doesn’t look too bad.
2. Bugs. Everywhere.
I let a cockroach live in my coat closet for three weeks and resigned myself to walking downstairs with shoes on at all times because I hadn’t mentally prepared myself for the fact that one day, I’d have to kill a cockroach and it took me three weeks to finally trap it under a plastic orange cup. It took me another week to get rid of the cup. I found a spider on the inside of my shower curtain, a daddy longlegs in the corner of my front door and something I don’t have the name for clinging to my bedroom wall and I begged my friends to come over and help me with the extermination.
3. You feel like an adult for the first time
I’m still a sophomore in college and I’m still very much a small fish in a very big pond, but there’s seomthing about buying your own doormat, fixing your own garbage disposal and organizing your array of coffee cups into a tiny cupboard that makes you feel a little less like a child. Honestly though, sometimes I wish I could go back to the blind naivety that was living in my parents’ house, because who knew rent was going to be THAT expensive?
This list barely scratches the surface, and having only lived in my apartment for five months means that I’ll have another list ready at the end of the year, because there’s no way I’m an expert yet. (Seriously though, I wish I knew about the bugs.)
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