How to make your student house a home

carousel_house

Moving into your new crib is an exciting time, and for many students it gives them their first taste of independence – swapping life with parents for fun with college buddies, getting out of bed when you want, eating what you like, partying… and, of course, the less fun stuff like cleaning the bathroom, doing the weekly shop and paying the bills!

So once you’ve moved into your new student house or flat, unless you’re lucky enough to live in a luxurious boutique student residence, it can feel a bit disenchanting to sit down on your tiny single bed and look around at your shabby old MDF desk, dubious brown carpet and curtains that surely went out of fashion in the late 1980s.

Graduate Heather has less-than-fond memories of her first student house in Cambridge: ‘Living away from home for the first time was so exciting and I was lucky enough to live with some great housemates,’ she explains. ‘We didn’t find our first house until the last minute, so all of the good places had been taken and all that was left was the real dregs. The house was a small Victorian terrace with no central heating, ‘retro chic’ kitchen units and a bathroom suite that must have been from the 1950s – plus a vacuum cleaner that was so old it threw out more dust than it sucked up. It didn’t matter how much my housemates and I cleaned it, the house always felt grubby and not at all homely.

‘When we went into our second year we found somewhere a lot nicer, but as with most student houses, it was very ‘no frills’. The three of us decided to club together and take a trip to Ikea to buy a few bits for the house – a large throw to go over the shabby sofa, a cheap and cheerful rug for the living room floor, a new washing up bowl and cutlery drainer for the kitchen (as the ones that came with the house were pretty gross!), some new plates and glasses and a couple of pot plants to brighten the place up. We also bought a bath mat, which only cost a couple of quid but meant we didn’t have to step out of the bath straight onto a dirty carpet! We only spent about £20 each, but it made a huge difference to how we felt about our house and helped it feel a lot more like ‘our’ home rather than a place that had had seen an endless stream of students passing through over the years.’

Making your student house a home

Here are some tips to help you make your student house feel more homely…

1. Bedding in

You’ll probably be spending at least three terms in your new place, and a fair bit of that time will be spent sleeping off big nights out or catching up on rest after burning the midnight oil to meet a deadline, so it’s worth making your bed as cosy as possible. A mattress topper is a great way to turn a hard, uncomfortable bed into one you won’t want to drag yourself out of. It also has the added bonus of putting some distance between you and the mattress, which is unlikely to be brand new in a student house! A mattress protector is a cheaper option – it won’t give you the added comfort of a mattress topper but it can help make the bed feel less ‘second hand’.

Older student houses can be a bit chilly, especially if one of your housemates is particularly militant when it comes to turning up the central heating. To help combat this, invest in a duvet with a high tog rating to keep you snug over the winter. Hollowfibre duvets are a cheaper option than those filled with feather and down, but will still keep you nice and toasty while you’re catching some z’s or binging on a box set on the sofa. And cheerful, colourful bedding is an easy way to brighten up an otherwise uninspiring bedroom, so look out for duvet and pillow sets featuring vibrant colours and patterns at cost-effective shops like Ikea or on the high street during the sales.

2. Add a splash of colour

Let’s face it – your rented student house is highly unlikely to resemble the end product of an episode of Grand Designs. A house with cheap but clean carpets, magnolia painted walls, a basic but relatively modern kitchen and a simple white bathroom suite is probably the best you can hope for when searching for a budget rental, with many students ending up living with the delights of woodchip wallpaper, a 1970s kitchen complete with lime green tiles and strip-lighting, and an avocado bathroom suite. Combine this with clauses in the contract about not Blu-Tacking anything on the walls or putting up picture hooks, and it’s tempting to just live with it – but anything you can do to add colour to your bedroom will help to cheer the place up enormously. This could be a couple of bright cushions, a rug, some retro-style bunting hung below some shelves or just some framed prints or photos for your desk.

3. Throw some light on the subject

There’s nothing cosy about a stark, utilitarian overhead light in your bedroom, but a decent floor lamp will provide a much less harsh light, a mellow bedside table lamp will help you unwind and relax before you nod off, and a cool Anglepoise-style desk lamp will prove invaluable when you’re hammering out the references for that pressing essay at 3am. And having multiple light sources in your room will allow you to change the mood for the evening or early winter mornings by using them in combination.

4. Cover it

Throws are a great investment for student houses. Stick one over the sofa to make it feel less scruffy, or over your bed to smarten up your room. The added bonus of a throw is that it’ll help to protect whatever it’s covering, so there’s less chance a spill from a glass of red wine will eat into your deposit.

5. Personalise

It’s not easy deciding what to bring with you to uni. Once you’ve got your clothes, laptop and all those pots and pans in the car, there’s not much room for anything else and you’ll probably end up packing and then re-packing the car to squeeze in as much as possible. But one or two personal items will help to make your new room feel familiar – this could be a few photos of your friends from home, a poster, a novelty alarm clock or even just a couple of your favourite books.

6. Club together

If you get on well with your housemates, why not see if they fancy contributing to a kitty for a few bits and pieces to brighten up the communal areas? With so many shops selling low-cost homeware such as Ikea and Aldi, buying items for your new home doesn’t have to be expensive and is a fun way for you and your mates to put your stamp on your new home and make it look a bit more modern.

Win! Win! Win!

TSB-spSo what one thing makes your student house or flat your home? British Gas are currently running a No Place Like Home competition, where you can win a cool SONOS PLAY:1 Two Room Starter Set if you enter between 12 and 18 October 2015. Or, if you’d prefer to get your skates on, enter between 19 and 25 October to be in with a chance of winning one of 12 pairs of tickets to go ice-skating.

You can enter by simply tweeting @BritishGas describing the one thing that makes your house a home, together with the hashtag #NoPlaceLikeHome (full T&Cs are available on the British Gas website), so why not give it a whirl!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *