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House Sharing Horror Story

Be careful who you chose to live with, they might set the house on fire

By Shy StorytellerPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Student years can be some of the most beautiful but also some of the most challenging moments in someone's life. Like most, I moved from Eastern Europe to the UK in search for better opportunities, an improved quality of life and for better education. What better time to move than at 19 year old to start university? For those of you who don't know, at many universities in the UK you have guaranteed university accommodation in your first year but due to limited availability you have to rent privately from the second year onward.

For me the first year of university was also the best one. I lived in a student house, my housemates became my best friends and we had loads of fun social nights and parties. After the second year I found a classmate who was also looking for accommodation. We haven't been particularly close but we were looking for someone to rent a house with. On a a side note, rent is usually really expensive in student cities unless you afford to rent a flat by yourself, you have to buddy up with other students to rent a house to share. We found an affordable house but it was for 4 people so we needed to more house buddies. Luckily my colleague Vanessa had a friend, Lana who was also looking for a place for her an her sister Paula. The four of us decided to sign a one year lease on the house together. At first everything was great but shortly tension started to build up which is quite normal when you share a house with people especially if they are not your close friends.

One day I went to uni, work and then to the gym. When I was walking home I felt the smell of smoke and I thought I can vaguely hear a fire alarm. My heart started beating faster and faster because the closer I got to home the stronger the smell and the louder the noise were. When I got to the door I knew that the fire was at our house but there was no going back now. I was worried for anyone who might have been in the house so I have done the most stupid thing ever to enter the building and try to fix things myself.

The house was covered in thick, black smoke and I could barely see anything and breathing was very difficult. I was coughing and trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from.

While waiting for the fire brigade, I figured out that the problem was coming from the kitchen. It turned out that Paula was home alone and decided to boil eggs. She left the eggs to boil and completely forgot about them. She then left the house which was left empty, with the fire going and an egg boiling in water which quickly evaporated, leaving the pot and the egg to carbonise. Never have I been more scared in my life!

Luckily no one got hurt and I got back home in time. However the worse part was that Vanessa and Lana thought it was funny and didn't actually believe me when I said that when I got home there was a pot burning on the stove. They didn't get upset with Paula and their first instinct was to blame me for not double locking the door. They said that because I didn't double lock the door there was a chance that someone broke into our house and intentionally put a pot of water to boil.

It was such a traumatic experience. House-sharing is very frustrating at times and even dangerous. Choose your housemates wisely!

student travel
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