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VACUUMING (AND OTHER CLEANING DUTIES)

A major part of living at uni, whether you are living on accommodation or not, is cleaning. Cleaning is not fun, but is has to be done, no matter where you live. However what type of cleaning and how much you need to clean does depend on whether you live at accommodation or not.

When I lived at Campus East, how much cleaning you had to do depended on whether you lived in a flexi-catered or self-catered unit. In my first year, I lived in a flexi-catered unit which meant that I and my four flatmates only had to pick up after ourselves and only take the garbage bag out of the bin in the common room out to pass an inspection. The cleaners would clean the bathrooms once a week and our bedrooms every two weeks. The flatmates I lived with were generally tidy.

However I wasn’t so lucky in my second year when I lived in a self-catered unit. I lived with four girls, two of them were slobs and the other two didn’t help out with cleaning the unit and I had to clean the whole unit myself for our inspections. The cleaners would only clean the self-catered units when residents failed three inspections at residents’ own expense. As slobby as two of the girls were, this didn’t happen to us. However there were a couple of occasions when I was out of town of course and wasn’t cleaning, that our unit failed an inspection. However the girls did clean to avoid having to pay for the units to be cleaned, that’s the only time they helped out.

When I lived at Marketview, I lived in an ensuite bedroom not in a unit and on my own. The only communal areas were a kitchen in each wing and a laundry. The cleaners would clean our rooms every week, however this policy changed and now residents have to clean their own rooms. I’m not averse to cleaning, if anything I clean up after almost everyone else, however considering how much money it would cost to live at Marketview, cleaning should be a service we should have. When I lived in the self-catered unit at Campus East, it was cheaper than living at Marketview.

Every student has their own way of cleaning, if they clean at all. Unfortunately putting up with questionable or lazy cleaning habits is a part of university life and living with other people.

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