. . . on moving house
THE WEEKEND TWO friends and I are due to move into our new apartment draws close and a colleague wishes me luck. “You know that, statistically, moving house is the third most traumatic life experience a person can have after bereavement and divorce?” No, I did not. Not yet, anyway. For sure, the friend who has to manage it alone with two manic toddlers in the middle of the week knows it. Us? As the great twin-headed philosopher Jedward is wont to say, we’re living the dream.
We’re all 26. We have all lived in all types of bizarre accommodations across the world. Between us, we have enough material to fill a couple of those 101 Most Unbelievable Roommate Stories stocking fillers.
But this time is different. We’ve been back in Dublin about six months, nervous, with the thrumming back-beat of “Why would you come back here? Losers . . .” But it doesn’t feel like that. Probably because it’s the first time since leaving college that we have an idea of what we’re at. At last.
Now we have choices. We think.
This time around, we can choose not to live in Stalinist-era college rooms or crack den-esque apartments in “up-and-coming” areas where bathroom ceilings and bedroom windows fall in on showering or sleeping bodies (Edinburgh). We can choose not to share with “colourful” characters found on letting websites, such as the one who steals cans of food and hides them under her bed (also Edinburgh); creeps into my room in the middle of a bone-chilling December night to steal the blanket that lies between me and hypothermia (Washington); allows a mangy old cat to trail its litter-tray contents all over a windowless apartment (New York); keeps a pitiful little pitbull that needs to be walked at midnight, by me (again, Washington); leaves typed passive-aggressive notes about cleaning the hob after use, complete with handwritten signature, stuck to the fridge (London).
I’m just delighted that I don’t need to go through the soul-destroying process of housemate application forms: basically a job application form, except potential housemates aren’t looking for a particular skill set. They’re judging purely on personality.
I was once told, after a rigorous set of interviews and form-filling, that (unfortunately) I hadn’t made the cut. I wasn’t suitable, they said. They just didn’t like me, I said. How embarrassing. More embarrassing is that the same terrifying interviewer called a week later and said a new slot had become available and that I could have that. Even more embarrassing and sad is that I said yes and thanked her profusely for choosing me (having previously rejected me).
So there’s no great trauma about spending June trawling Daft.ie and creating lengthy, deranged e-mail threads – mainly about houses on Wellington Road that we can’t afford, as in, “Look I know it’s €900 over budget but surely we can bargain her down in this day and age”, or the idiot agents living in a 2006 timewarp whose only viewing times are 1pm or 5pm and still say “take it or leave it”, or the ones we just know are lying through their teeth about a third double bedroom, which will surely turn out to be an under-the-stairs cubby of Harry Potter’s nightmares.
I’d like to say that we suffered. We didn’t. We didn’t actually put ourselves out so far as going to view any of the above. Instead, we go to our first viewing armed with a list of “tough” questions and full of determined “of course, we won’t take first place we see”. And we take the first place we see.
The tough questions go out the window as we metaphorically bounce on the beds (in the three proper double bedrooms). Oooohing and ahhing about the balcony and the big bath and what an Ikea rug would do . . . At this point, even the agent feels duty bound to tell us to go away and think about it. But no, NO – we’re sold. We go for prematurely celebratory drinks in the pub across the road to make ourselves feel better and at least slightly grown-up and to make a list of pros and cons but actually . . . ahhhhh, I really want it.
Never mind the Dart rumbling past not six feet from the balcony, or that there’s a single, tiny shower between three normal-sized women who scramble up for work at the same time every morning.
Over a couple of weeks we come to our senses (thanks mainly to the agent) and ask all the questions we should have asked before handing over deposits.
And here we are, a few weeks on, squashed on our little balcony lit with flares inserted in little plastic buckets filled with sand, toasting our new home with glasses of prosecco in the evening sun. We’re almost intimately acquainted with the Dart drivers – and with Neil Diamond, warming up in the Aviva.
We are back in Dublin. And we’re fine. We have a decent landlord and a decent home at a decent rent. And all those things we’d never have known to miss but learned from our travels – the easy, familiar walk to work, bumping into people you know, friends, beach and chipper a stroll away, home a bus-ride away – are here on our doorstep. Right here, right now, we are the lucky ones. And we know it.
Sarah Geraghty is a freelance writer
Róisín Ingle is on annual leave