My life in student housing: Too many slugs and not enough hot water…

The living situation is a big part of student life and for the past two years I have been living in a student house in Huddersfield with two friends from university. I have enjoyed these past two years living in accommodation but that does not mean there has not been any issues along the way, especially in the middle of a global pandemic.

Even from the get go there were problems, before I moved in the landlord had workers doing work on the house to improve it which is great however, the workers had not cleaned up left over mess in my room. So, the day I had arrived to move in my room was full of paint pots, ladders and tools which obviously is not ideal at all. Moving in day was problematic enough with my room not being ready but just a few weeks later we had discovered a slug infiltration! There were slug trails all over the living room, meaning we had to find the start of the trail to put down slug deterrent.

The bad start continued when we discovered that other people had dumped rubbish into our green bin, biggest issue with this being rubbish that the bin men will not take making us stuck with it. The rubbish included the most bizarre things such as rubble, nappies and even toilet lids! To try and solve this me and my housemates contacted our landlord and the Kirklees Council. My housemate James Aldridge, who studies history, found this very frustrating “this process was ridiculous, our landlord claimed she ordered a new bin for us that never arrived and the council just ignored our emails and calls, we were just stuck with someone else’s rubbish!” Bear in mind this was back in October 2020 and it ended up not being emptied by the council until May 2021! This was not much help though as by August 2021 it was once again filled to the brim with other people’s rubbish.

Fortunately, we had a good spell for a while of no issues until December 2021 hit. Winter is cold enough as it is but disaster struck for us when our heating stopped working. Well the whole boiler had stopped working meaning no heating and no hot water which is a nightmare, especially in England. My other housemate Zak Mullier, business studies student from Glasgow, did not enjoy that experience: “It was absolutely freezing; the house is poorly insulated anyway and Huddersfield has got to be the coldest place I have ever lived!” Fortunately, the plumber was able to get here the next day but it was still a rather cold day at the house until then. We thought this would be the end of our boiler issues but we were unfortunately very wrong. Just a month later the boiler stopped working again but this time it was worse, it started a leak through my bedroom ceiling! Which we had to wait almost a week for a plumber to come and fix.

December 2021 was also a bad month because one of the worst things to break that could break did and that was our front door. I had got back in late at night after a long day at work and the door would not shut so me and my two housemates ended up barricading the door with tables and chairs and staying up all night keeping watch. Unbelievably our landlord did not send anyone round to fix the door for two days which is beyond ridiculous. What is even more ridiculous is the door has broken twice since and even as I am writing this it is currently broken again to the point where we cannot even get the door open.

Given my bad luck of living in a student house I thought it would be a good idea to ask someone else who lives in a different student house so I asked a friend of mine Jake Reid who lives in a student house in Newcastle, he said: “Unfortunately for you I think you have been very unlucky as I have also been living in a student house for two years and have never had any of those incidents happen to me.”

As much as there have been issues that I have pointed out over the past two years when living in a student house, I have still much preferred to the alternative which is student accommodation flats which I was in my first year, where I had to share a flat with seven other people I did not know and did not particularly get along with to be honest.