How do you make the most of an empty house? Thanks to soaring rents, falling housing availability and plateauing salaries, most twenty- and thritysomethings have flatmates. Whether those flatmates are your parents, your frenemies, besties or bae, having the house to yourself is a rare and wonderful experience.
Unfortunately, it can be so unusual to get a couple of hours uninterrupted alone time that choice paralysis becomes inevitable. While the default option is a Charmed marathon and constant wanking, there are a couple of other things you can do to make the most of your time...
Change your morning routine
Now’s the time to start all those new activities and resolutions you never normally get around to. That dusty hulahoop under the bed? Those shiny muffin trays with the stickers still on? The fire poi? The jam-making kit? The amp you’ve dragged through five house moves?
Spend the first 30 minutes of your morning on these abandoned projects and feel magnificently productive for the rest of the day.
Make yourself a Netflix playlist
Actually make two: one for films that none of your housemates would want to watch with you and one for films that you wouldn’t want to watch with your housemates. Then build a Netflix nest out of every duvet in the house, make sure all pets have been captured and are resigned to 10 straight hours of cuddling, position everything in the fridge within easy reach and, most importantly...
Turn off social media
There are, ironically, a tonne of online articles to explain why you should have a digital detox but the number one reason? Deleting Facebook off your phone is the only guaranteed way to add 12 extra hours to your day. The drawback to being without social media is that everyone around you will still be checking their phones every 30 seconds, which is why a weekend alone is the perfect time to try going cold turkey.
Listen to erotica podcasts and turn up your sex mix
All those podcasts and playlists you usually only listen to with headphones while glancing furiously around to make sure no one has noticed your perving? Turn them up! Whatever miserable chores you’ve got lined up will be immediately improved when soundtracked by any of these podcasts.
Fuck The Pain Away by Peaches is also highly recommended for when you...
Spread (all your stuff) out
Take every single thing out of your room, spread all your stuff around the house and leave it like that for at least 24 hours. Rearrange all your furniture, put it back again, take some soulful selfies in your empty room and then start slow-moving stuff back in. Start with the sentimental, then the pretty, then the useful. Everything else can probably go in the bin.
Cook something elaborate... or really, really, sad
This is the weekend to start finally using that pasta maker, to start cooking with saffron and oils that aren’t olive. It’s the time to spend far too much money on far too little food. Or it’s the weekend to go ‘fuck it’ and refuse to eat anything that doesn’t come with a white bread base. In an empty house no one need to know that you’re topping all those Guardian sad lunches.
Start a blog
One of the only drawbacks to unexpected alone time is that your Mark Corrigan internal monologue will get that bit louder. Rather than drown it out, harness all your anxiety-laden, inner-musings and plough them into a blog. A fake-fur fashion tumblr, Idris Elba appreciation, overlooked UK novelists active between 1954 and 1956, Scott of the Antarctic-style descriptions of your trips to Tesco, Harry Potter erotica, Photoshopping George Osborne’s head onto the McDonalds Hamburglar.
The secret to keeping a blog going is to write and schedule a million posts in the beginning – which is what weekends home alone were made for.
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
5 Things To Buy For Under £5 To Stop Your Living Room Looking Like A Squat
15 Signs You’ve Been Living With Your Housemates For Too Long
Follow Beulah on Twitter @TheNotoriousBMD
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.