The House Share.

So on bonfire night, after a bottle of wine (always the best time to make decisions) my dear friend and colleague Kate made me a proposition...

(No, not that kind of proposition!)

She asked if I wanted to be her roomie if we could find a house share.

As much as I've grown to love my little city nest, the lack of essentials like a washing machine and an oven have finally become too much, and I really need to find somewhere I can make a home.

So, for the last few weeks, we have been trawling spare room sites looking for places to live.

We really thought we had hit lucky with a 5 bedroom share in Burley. It had everything we were looking for, plus the price was good...

But something which seems to be too good to be true, usually is.

If I was Carrie Bradshaw and Leeds was Manhattan, this place was the Bronx.

The first big cross in the box was the pile of litter just casually sitting in the street across the road from the house.

Who the hell are the neighbours?!

Cross two was the front door. Now me and Kate are by no means roided up gym bunnies, and we could have put our knuckles through the front door just by knocking on it.

It didn't instil much confidence about security!

By the time the landlord arrived to show us around, I had already planned a fairly strategic break in and my concerns were pretty high.

Then we got inside...

Putting it politely, whoever took the photos of the place for the website must be an absolute wizard with a camera.

The advert never said that exposed wiring, peeling paintwork and damp were the existing housemates.

I think the landlord sensed our disappointed and we were outta there pretty sharpish, not before I had time to fall down the stairs though.

Bloody shoes.

Mortified but laughing, I headed back to Burley station to catch the train back to the city centre, when I was stopped by a ticket inspector: "have you got a ticket?"

"Yeah, sure", I replied, reaching for my purse.

"This is an off-peak ticket, you'll need to pay 5p extra for another one".

I genuinely thought he was kidding.

He wasn't.

So 5p lighter and with a twisted ankle I waited on the platform for a good 20 minutes, to find that the train was delayed.

Needless to say, I'm not feeling much love for Burley right now!

And so we find ourselves back to the proverbial drawing board. Luckily, the experience has only given me faith that we can't genuinely find anywhere worse to live.

Every cloud eh!

L x