Room selection is a challenge in Dunedin

Signing a flat is exhilarating. I think it’s just part of that ‘grass is always greener’ mentality: throughout the year, you notice more and more things wrong with your living conditions that make it all too easy to glorify your digs for next year. Whether it’s a shitty bathroom, living with two hundred other students in halls and having zero personal space or finally getting rid of that one weird flatmate, signing that dotted line feels like more than a new lease on a house. It’s a new lease on life itself. So, congratulations! But there’s one final hurdle: room selections.

I’m not sure whether the architects of Dunedin were participating in some mass conspiracy, but you’re more likely to ride a unicorn than find a flat where all bedrooms are the same size. It’s probably something to do with decades of landlords subdividing, extending, and squeezing another rentable bedroom into any patch of floor capable of fitting a mattress, but that's a conversation for another day.

After committing yourself to a year-long contract, you might get some post-signing clarity. You might look back at the pictures you all took when you viewed the place, and realise that one room is actually quite small. When that ‘When are we deciding rooms?’ text comes, you might feel a pit in your stomach. You might try to gaslight yourself into thinking that paying an extra $10 to not take that room wouldn't be so bad.

Today I’m here to make a far less disheartening case: why you should actually put your hand up for the small room. Or, at the very least, why you shouldn't fear it.

Take it from a seasoned survivor. I spent a year in a room only a couple centimeters wider than my queen bed, and I genuinely had the time of my life. Sure, once all my furniture was in there I could barely sit on the floor, but what the room lacked in square meterage, it somehow made up for in charm. While everyone else saw the tiny room as the flat’s obvious short straw, I’d become a lot less defensive about it by the end of the year.

So I’m here to end the victim mentality of small-room residents across Ōtepoti and give you some advice. Your room is not a punishment. It's a challenge.