The flatmate is away. The freezer can finally be defrosted. This is your moment.
There’s a specific kind of joy that only share house veterans understand. It’s not the joy of a pay rise, or a surprise pizza, or finding a $20 note in your old jeans. It’s quieter than that. More sacred.
It’s the sound of a door closing, a car pulling out of the driveway, and the slow realisation washing over you like warm shower water at the exact right pressure that you will not have to share that shower with anyone else for the next 72 hours.
The flatmate is away. Long may it last.
Now, before we go further, let’s be absolutely clear about something: this is not an invitation to go rifling through anyone’s things. That’s not who we are. That’s not who you are. The underwear drawer stays closed. The laptop stays closed. The medicine cabinet? Closed. We are civilised people who simply happen to have the television remote entirely to ourselves for three glorious days.
This is about freedom. Specific, delicious, share-house freedom.
Step One: Establish Dominance Over the Common Areas
The living room is yours now. All of it. You may place a single item — a book, a blanket, a snack — on any surface you choose. You may sit in the good chair. You may sit in their chair if you want to, actually, because it’s not their chair right now, is it? It’s everyone’s chair. It was always everyone’s chair. You’ve just been too polite to sit in it.
Sprawl freely. The couch does not have a designated side when there’s only one person.
Step Two: Eat Things You Would Never Eat in Front of Them
You know the meal. You know exactly what it is. The thing that smells a bit, or makes a noise, or requires you to stand at the bench eating it directly from the pan because the washing up situation is already, you know, a situation.
Whatever it is, tonight’s the night. Cold noodles at 11pm? Absolutely. An entire block of cheese consumed in a way that technically counts as dinner? This is a safe space. The judgment-free share house only exists for a limited time, and that time is now.
Step Three: Control the Ambient Sound
Put on something you love that they hate. Not to be vindictive — just because you can. Maybe it’s that podcast series they always called “a lot.” Maybe it’s a playlist that has been described, more than once, as “not really a vibe.” Maybe it’s just silence. Incredible, uninterrupted silence, with no one asking you what you’re watching or whether you’ve seen their charger.
Play it at a volume that feels slightly unreasonable. Revel in it.
Step Four: Do Not Clean. And Then Absolutely Clean.
There’s a strange psychological phenomenon that occurs around day two of having the place to yourself. You will have fully embraced the chaos — a mug here, a jacket on the chair, yesterday’s shoes still in the hallway — and then something will shift.
You will look around and think: I could just… tidy up.
And then you will. Not because you have to. Not because anyone asked. But because it’s your mess, controlled on your terms, and you will put things away in exactly the order you want to put them away, which is the correct order, which is the order that no one else in this house has ever respected.
It will be very satisfying. This is allowed.
Step Five: Call Your Mum Without Announcing You’re Going to Call Your Mum
In a share house, phone calls happen in bedrooms, in hushed tones, in the hallway with one finger in your ear. When you have the place to yourself, you can pace the entire kitchen while talking. You can say “hold on, let me put you on speaker” and then actually put them on speaker. You can have the kind of long, winding, full-volume conversation that a shared living space simply does not accommodate.
This is underrated. Do it.
Step Six: Sleep Like a Starfish
This only applies if, in some alternate universe, you ever end up on the couch. Which you won’t. But if you did. Diagonal. Fully diagonal.
The Bit Where We Get Philosophical For a Second
Here’s the thing about having the place to yourself: it’s good in the way that holiday is good. Not because your regular life is bad. But because stepping out of it for a moment makes you appreciate it differently when you step back in.
When the flatmate gets home, the good chair becomes the good chair again. The hot water becomes something you negotiate. The remote is no longer entirely yours. And somehow, weirdly, that’s fine. Because share house life, at its best, is a kind of daily negotiation that you’ve both quietly agreed to — even when neither of you has said it out loud.
But first: the noodles. The good chair. The podcast that is “a lot.”
You’ve earned it.
Looking for your next flatmate — or your next place to yourself between flatmates? Start your search at flatmate.com.
Tags: share house life, living together, home alone, flatmate tips, little pleasures
