Funniest Housing Stories

What is your weirdest/ funniest housing experience? Check out some student’s stories right here!

Chloe, 3rd year, Law LLB

When we had students round to view our house the lettings agent asked us if we enjoyed living here and my housemate said a dead-pan ‘No,’ to her surprise. I don’t think that it sealed the deal for that house viewing!

Maya, 4th year, Business and Management (With Industrial Experience)

I got locked out of my room before I even moved into my second-year house! The key was left in the room and the door left open until I moved in, but my housemate forgot and one night when she was closing the front door, she walked past my room (I was on ground floor) and closed the door instinctually. The first day I moved I slept in my housemates’ room thankfully because she was away that night, and the next day a contractor came around and had to break the door down and replace it!

Briony, 4th year, Modern Languages

I did a year abroad in my third year and I remember trying to sort out my housing while I wasn’t in the country. All my new housemates were in Exeter, but I am a little bit of a control freak and I really wanted to find us a house that we were all happy with. I remember being sat at a café table in the pouring rain in a little city in Italy using up all my phone call allowances to talk to landlords and arrange viewings while all the people around me were staring at the ‘weird English girl’ who was talking too loudly!

Lucy, 3rd year, BA History

My housemate and I had a weird experience viewing the house we currently live in. We met this rather eccentric property agent outside the house, and after knocking three times, he reached for his set of keys and remarked “I hope nobody is in!” We followed him inside the house, which had clearly hosted a party the night before; there were empty wine bottles and cans, glasses, and tobacco scattered all over the table and floors. The agent then asked us if we wanted to see the bathroom, knocked on the bathroom door, and opened it to reveal the tenant naked in the shower! After many red faces and apologies, we continued to view the bedrooms where we also managed to walk in on another tenant sleeping (again naked… and with a guest). All this embarrassment meant we barely got a good look at the house but signed the tenancy regardless. Living in the house now, we always make sure to lock the doors!

Victoria, 3rd year, BA English

One of my funniest memories from our second-year house was buying an inflatable paddling pool for our back garden during lockdown. We set up an elaborate system for filling up the paddling pool from our kitchen sink tap, involving lots of Sellotape and tinfoil tubes. Unfortunately, these contraptions were not as sturdy as we thought, and when we turned the tap on full blast and rushed outside to watch the paddling pool filling up, we noticed there wasn’t any water coming out of our DIY hose. We ran back to the kitchen to discover that our pipework had partly exploded, spraying a fountain of water around the kitchen. We got soaked trying to turn the tap off, and by the time we had mopped up all the water, the paddling pool outside had completely deflated. Thankfully, after a few more attempts we were able to enjoy the sun and a glass of wine, all from the comfort and luxury of our patched-up paddling pool.

Amy, 4th year, MSc Global Sustainability Solutions

In my first year, when we were viewing potential houses for second year, we visited many houses, but one stood out because of how full it was. Not of people, or furniture – bizarrely, it was full of chicken and mushroom Pot Noodles. They were on every single surface in the house, from the coffee table to the top of a wardrobe. We hoped the tenants had won some kind of competition to have acquired this many Pot Noodles, but it remains a mystery. I would be impressed if they had managed to get through all of them over the course of the year – there were hundreds!

Madeleine, 3rd year, Law

One of the strange, but nice things we used to do as a house of 6 was weekly Mario kart tournaments. Every Sunday we would play, depending on who was available and wanted to. One of my funniest memories of that house was organising a tournament that involved drinking and forfeits depending on how you did in each race. It was incredibly funny to watch a group of 20 years-olds get so competitive over a game that we all used to play as kids and was only made funnier by everyone’s inability to play the more we drank. As we were nearing the end, my housemate spent his last race thinking he was winning only to realise he had made the classic mistake of watching our other housemate’s screen the whole time, meaning he had barely moved at all and had come last. We found it absolutely hilarious!