Things you’ll only find in a Sheffield student house

Student housing is like Brexit – you may not necessarily agree with it, but it looks like you’re going to have to go along with it anyway.

You may have fallen out with hour housemates, or you may be best friends with them, you may not even know some of your housemates because they spend most of their time in their room hoarding all the mugs. Yet there are just some things that every Sheffield student house has in common.

Essentially, student living will be the worst experience of your life, but hey, it makes a pretty good listicle.

Traffic cones/road signs/property of the council

If there’s one thing students love more than anything*, it’s council property. I’m talking traffic cones, road signs, essentially anything that was designed for the road but has somehow become a great backdrop for photos at parties.

*This is a lie, there’s only one thing students love, and it’s club appearances by their childhood TV heroes, i.e. the Chuckle Brothers.

Tapestries

Do you really live in a student house if you don’t have one of those exotically patterned tapestries covering a whole wall? Those kaleidoscope wall sheets that scream ‘I smoked weed once and it kind of made me feel sick but I went along with it because I’m at university now and I want to reinvent myself’. Let's be honest, there's more chance of finding one of these hanging in a student house than finding a working fire alarm.

Things that aren’t ashtrays but have been repurposed as ashtrays

The scene is a post-party wasteland. Swathes of Red Stripe cans litter the floor, the smell of smoke hangs in the air, shame is awash. Someone has used a mug as an ashtray. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Really, Really Steep Stairs. Like Unnecessarily Steep Stairs

There is no need for stairs to be that steep, especially not in an environment where you’re coming home from nights out drunk and totally unable to ascend stairs of a steady gradient, let alone the ones in your student house (See also, Corp Stairs).

There is only one thing steeper than student house stairs, and it’s student house rents.

Damp

Let’s face it, we’re all getting Tuberculosis.

Photobooth Photos

Did you even go to Leadmill if you didn’t get a photo in the photobooth? The first photo you’ve pulled the perfect pose, second photo is equally as good. Third photo your mate moves and it catches you off guard and the photo catches you mid-movement, maybe even mid-sentence. The fourth photo is a shambles. The upside of this is that photobooth photos make perfect decorations, and also come in handy covering up damp patches.

(Other People’s) Unwashed Washing Up

It’s never your washing up though, is it?

“Can we do something about the kitchen? It’s disgusting”, one of your housemates will say in the group chat. The group chat has replaced the outdated idea of passive aggressive post it notes, replaced by the ‘passive aggressive thumbs up’ and ‘passive aggressive tactically ignoring messages’.

“None of it’s mine”, you’ll say, you liar. At least one of those plates is yours, snuck in there amongst the mess where no one will notice. Yeah, it may not be as bad as your housemate who attempted a curry and left pans all over the side to go mouldy, but you’re a part of it too, whether you like it or not.

Now you must either hold a truce and you each do a fair amount of washing up, or stick it out until someone goes mental and does it all themselves, holding it against you for months to come. The real student politics.

A Stone Roses Poster

My theory is that if you calculated how much money The Stone Roses have made from record sales and how much money The Stone Roses have made from the sales of posters, posters would easily come out on top.

I also have a theory that about 99 per cent of that poster revenue will come from lads called Liam who also own a Stone Roses t-shirt and will waste no time telling you that Courteeners’ ‘Not Nineteen Forever’ is a banger. It is not.

One Person with a Printer

There is only one person in your house getting a 1st at uni, and that is the person with a printer.