Finding a flat

I moved into a flat today. It's a relatively new 4 bedroom flat in Thorndon, which is the same part of town as my office. If you follow this link you can see the building on Google street view, it's the building with the wooden balcony and my room is on the bottom floor of the building. A little pleasure for me is that my address is now on Parliament Street (yes, I am that much of a geek).


Looking for the flat was a bit of an experience. There's a website where people with rooms to rent post details, much like Gumtree in England. So having seen something your interested in you get in touch and arrange a viewing and a chance to meet the existing flatmates. I had about 8 or 10 of these in the course of a few days and each one is a bit like I imagine blind dates must be. You've got to make a good impression, without creating an image that would be impossible to maintain if you end up living with the person/people. At the same time you're frantically trying to work out from a couple of minutes of small talk whether they are someone who steals milk or uses the shower from 60 minutes in the morning. Oh, and at the same time you've got to check out the room itself and decide if you like that. Actually it's the people doing the letting out who I think have it hardest, there is a lot of demand for rooms here at the moment so they all ended up seeing a stream of people back-to-back to the point where they probably all blur into one.


It's fair to say I saw a mix of different places. A couple of really nice and friendly flats and then some more memorable ones. The lowlights were probably the flat the size of a postage stamp where the flatmate made a big point of how important it was for flatmates to 'give each other space' and the guy who described himself as liking 'a couple of drinks' in his advert. His couple of drinks were neat gin and whiskey by the bottle I discovered when I visited the flat at 8pm and found him swaying and almost incoherent. Luckily, after all of that and just when I was beginning to get stressed by the whole process one of the really nice groups got in touch and invited me to move in. I'm living with 2 girls and a guy, who all seem very chilled out and I have a good feeling about living here.


Moving in was pretty easy. I seemed to have acquired a lot more than the two suitcases I flew over with a couple of weeks ago. Some of this I put down to bad packing, but I also now own exciting items like coathangers and sheets. I have no idea what it's going to be like when I try and pack up in a year's time. Despite this it was still a quick job to taxi my stuff across to the new flat and get it unpacked. I haven't got any furniture yet - I bought a bed yesterday, to be delivered on Wednesday, so I'm surviving on a flatmates airbed for the next few days.