Living in a house – what not to bring

Nearly 11 months ago I wrote a post about what not to bring to uni when living in halls. Since for the past year I’ve been living in a privately rented house, I thought it would be a good idea to share some tips on not what to bring from my expert overpacking experience!

1. Pots and pans

Perhaps due to the coordination required avoid this, or perhaps because people were very optimistic about how much they were going to cook, my housemates and I decided to bring all our own pots and pans. Bearing in mind this was 4 – 5 items each, our kitchen was overflowing! We had something like 8 saucepans, 6 frying pans, 2 fruit bowls, 2 sieves, 4 cake pans, and only 1 baking tray. Luckily I found a space in our living room to store a bunch of them, but it still difficult to handle the amount sometimes! So I’d definitely advise coordinating it a bit to avoid that situation.

2. All the clothes

This may have been on the previous post, but once again I bought way too many clothes! There was an entire shelf of my wardrobe (which lacked a rail) that I didn’t touch all year. So a good idea would be to only pack what you would usually wear, and about enough to fill your washing basket – this will also encourage you to wash your clothes regularly because you won’t have anything else!

3. Unnecessary bedroom decorations

Whilst I can’t really show you a picture of my bedroom, I’m telling you it looked pretty wonderful in my opinion. Never the less, in hindsight I probably brought too many unnecessary decorations – too many posters and knic nacs that took up a lot of space in the car! I couldn’t really remember what my bedroom looked like until I got there, which turned out to not have a lot of storage space, which I think was part of the problem. I think next year a few big pieces will be better, to still give the room a homely feel but not make it too cramped. I’d like to set myself the challenge of fitting all my uni stuff into one car, which may or may not happen!

4. Hobbies you do at home

In the first term I brought things from home that I had been using a lot in the summer, and thought I might continue during my downtime at uni – like my guitar, painting easel, craft box. Yet in all the excitement and buzz of uni life, I never even thought about picking up these items. I found that I’d much rather spend any leisure time chilling with my housemate than sitting in my room, which I’d be doing enough of whilst studying! Of course if you are very dedicated to your hobby then do bring it along, but I found that my summer hobbies didn’t last whilst at uni.

I hope this post has provided you with some tips for what not to bring! I may do a post in future about what to bring as well, since there are many I can think of that would make this post far too long. See you soon!

Caroline