As if living in an undersized house with more people than is legally allowed wasn’t stressful enough, let’s just take a moment to remember that it’s about to get a whole lot more difficult.
Because of course, winter is coming. And that means a whole host of things for shared house dwellers – none of them good.
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Here’s a few problems to get ready for.
The clothes obstacle course
You’ve already used every spare inch of your house to store your various nefarious items from suitcases to shoes to winter coats, so when someone does their washing and cracks out the clothes horse in the hallway it already makes the house pretty tough to navigate. Except now it’s cold, clothes take a lot longer to dry, resulting in multiple clothes horses and jumpers and trousers hanging over every radiator, chair and curtain rail on offer. Your house looks like it belongs to a hoarder who’s set to perish when his piles of crap collapse in on him.
The passive aggressive heating war
Maybe you’re the dick that feels like the heating shouldn’t be on until 1 December or maybe you’re the (equally dickish) dick who’s been secretly turning it on since September, either way, you’re never going to see eye to eye about the ‘right’ way to do heating. Cue midnight scurries to the thermostat to push back/forward the time the heating comes on in the morning and weekends spent battling between the ‘frost protection’ and ‘exception day’ modes. It’s a cold (hot) war that makes no-one feel good about themselves.
The stressful mornings
Getting up is hard enough anyways, add a 10-degree drop in the temperature into the mix and it becomes nigh on impossible. Get ready then for your finely tuned shower schedule to be thrown way off course as people miss their unspoken but strictly enforced shower times after struggling to get up or overrun the also unspoken no-more-than-five-minutes rule to put off standing wet and naked in the cold.
The coat situation
HOW ARE THERE SO MANY WINTER COATS IN THE WORLD? People need one, maybe two, and yet for some reason each person in your house seems to have amaased a healthy collection that numbers somewhere in the 5-15 region. Winter coats are bulky and they smell, and they’re currently hanging off the banisters on your stairs, over doors and are dumped unceremoniously on couches and worktops, giving the whole place a healthy odour of wet dog.
The battle of the hob
You never thought you’d miss your housemates’ partying ways, but now it’s cold and they’ve cut back on the going out you’re starting to question that. Most annoying? They want to make ‘winter warmer’ food like, ALL the time, meaning every hob is taken up with a big pot of bubbling stew or soup that then sits in the fridge in Tupperware going mouldy while yet more batches are created. You on the other hand, haven’t been able to cook at home since before Hallowe’en.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.