The great escape. The great liberation. The great opportunity to do everything that living at home has apparently stopped you from doing.
That first taste of freedom is loaded with excitement and expectation, the kind which convinces you to stop eating supermarket pizza for dinner and instead have you meal planning and batch cooking for the week.
Having moved out of my parent’s house a month ago, I wanted to honour the occasion with a list of the things I’ve learned having fully flown the nest.
For all my new-movers, long-ago-movers or yet-to-movers, enjoy. Buy extra socks, you will somehow lose them.
You won’t be cooking every night and leftovers will inevitably be what make up most of your meals.
You also won’t be dining out and off galavanting through the city as often as you think — you’ll realise that living in a city is fucking expensive.
You’ll find yourself reorganising a lot in an attempt to fit all your crap with their crap. That storage closet in the hallway will be your version of Monica’s ‘secret closet’ — nobody knows what is in it and you can just about open the door before shoving more stuff in.
Decorating can’t be done in a weekend and eventually, you’ll be tired of having books laying across the floor and green tape marked out for where the bookshelf will go. Eventually, you’ll splurge on the IKEA Billy bookcase and pat yourself on your back that it’s done. We were never going to wait for that beautiful vintage dresser, were we?
You really won’t want people over as often as you think. The sweetness of privacy means you’ll mince your words and retract any offers of “hosting” dinner at your place.
A cliché, but the kitchen counter will always be slightly dusty no matter how many times you whack out the multi-purpose spray, there are crumbs coming from somewhere. I suspect there are gremlins afoot. Or a boyfriend eating cookies rather messily.
Even if you don’t have aTV, the TV license people will continue to send you menacing letters and “official warning” notices threatening to visit your property. Unless you actually are breaking the law, always bin them. Those bastards.
Children off from school will scream loudly in the courtyard. They’ll run around, ding the bells on their bicycles and you’ll pray for one of your neighbours to scream at them from their balcony so you don’t have to.
You’ll always be missing socks. I suspect there are also sock gremlins operating; they are most definitely in cahoots with the crumb gremlins.
You’ll be hoovering till the cows come home. Dust just flitters down from nowhere. One second it’ll all be fine and the next, you can feel the bits and grits sticking to the underside of your feet. The hoover will find a home in the hallway, ready to be used at a moments notice.
The laundry will forever be on. You will always be either washing, drying or putting away clothes. No one day will not have some form of chore attached to it.
Bedsheets — Mum’s not around to remind us to change our bedding, so I highly recommend you set a reminder to change them. You will forget and it will be a gross situation for everyone. The same goes for your bath towel. Please wash it.
At one point or another, you will have a light bulb that flickers and it will inevitably set off a chain reaction and several others will begin to flicker as well. Make sure you buy the right bulb.
Splitting chores will never be simple and you’ll realise that a 50/50 split is completely unrealistic. Sometimes you’ll do all the chores and sometimes you won’t and on a good day, you’ll write a list and tackle it together. It’s part balancing act, part being an adult.
Flowers are not just for special occasions and if you like them, fucking buy them. They last far longer than their label says and yes, they really do brighten up a room.
The Marie Kondo-way of folding clothes will grow old. One day, you’ll find yourself with a basket full of clean washing and all you’ll want to do is have it in the drawers regardless of how it fits. Occasionally you will organise your wardrobe in an effort to feel like you have your shit together, but ultimately it will always return to a bit of a tip.
You’ll have artwork and photographs and maps that you’ll want to hang. For whatever reason, it will take an inordinate amount of time for you to buy the frames and set aside the time to hang it up — if you ever do. It may just reside as a ‘lean against’ piece of work on the floor or booted to the back of the closet for your next home.
Freedom from parents doesn’t necessarily correlate with freedom to do whatever you want, to sleep at whatever time you want or eat whatever you want. Despite living away from home, you’ll feel protective of your space and the need to keep it private and yours.
You may miss being with family, but you won’t miss them enough to move back. In the end, you’ll discover that there isn’t anything more delightful than coming home to your own space and operating on your own damn schedule, free of worrying about if you’re taking up too much hot water in the shower, or eating someone else’s snacks, or staying up to late with the telly volume too loud.
SUCH a great list, Natalie! I can relate to most of them!
(I'm so tempted to stop Kondo-ing my socks, but my socks are the prettiest things in my wardrobe, and I'd miss being greeted by their beautifully-rolled eye candy every morning. 🤣)
Most of these are 100% my experience, haha. Loved the post!