There really is a difference between knowing your friends and knowing their shower schedules.
I found that out, among many other things — like how one of my friends watches the same 30 minutes of “Legally Blonde” on mute before bed, or how another likes to call unofficial dibs on the washing machine at 6 a.m. — during my senior year of college, when I moved into a six-bedroom house with seven of my besties for our last year of undergrad.
Living at the beach senior year was something everyone talked about on campus at San Diego State University — a college dream we’d heard about for years but never thought we’d actually pull off.
Suddenly, it stopped being a hypothetical when a girl who lived in a house in Pacific Beach, California, about a 20-minute drive from our school, said her place might be opening up. A few of us toured it, and before we knew it, we were signing a lease.
As we were getting ready to move in, we couldn’t wait for sandy feet, tipsy sunset walks, and spontaneous fish taco runs. But we wondered if living in a popular beach destination would be too much on our wallets.
Turns out, it was cheaper and logistically easier than we ever expected.
The finances were split evenly, and we used a spreadsheet to avoid chaos
Our six-bedroom house was essentially a long rectangle with rooms attached to it. One of the previous tenants, who lived with six other roommates, told us it would be “enough space,” but we realized that was a generous interpretation.
Even though it was challenging to squeeze so many people into this home, dividing up the finances was surprisingly easy.
We split the utilities evenly and divided the rent based on room size. I wanted the cheapest option, so I shared the master bedroom with my friend, whom I’d known since freshman year. The room barely fit two shaky Amazon twin beds, but my rent was just over $1,000 a month, so I never complained.
Additionally, we always split household expenses, like cleaning supplies and furniture, eight ways, with the plan to sell everything at the end and divide the profit equally. The only thing we purchased individually was our groceries.
Most of the practical problems had practical solutions, too. We made chore charts, carpooled, and figured out dinner schedules — because eight girls trying to cook in one tiny alley kitchen at once is a little challenging.
The harder part was everything we couldn’t put on a spreadsheet.
It wasn’t always constant fun, but the experience brought us closer in unexpected ways
Before we all shared a home, I pictured spending every waking moment with my friends. Instead, living together taught me that sometimes the best thing you can do is give someone space.
Some nights, I didn’t want to socialize — I just wanted to close my bedroom door. However, I learned I shouldn’t escape to my room whenever I felt frustrated with someone, and instead needed to have the uncomfortable conversations so little things wouldn’t fester.
Plus, even though being in close quarters with my best friends was amazing, there were still issues of exclusion in the house. Over time, everyone organized themselves into sections, unofficial little pockets of who was closest to whom, and it took effort to make sure those sections didn’t calcify into something more permanent.
Overall, though, during our time living together, we stopped being just friends who made plans and became people who knew each other’s bad moods and weird habits. I saw them at their most tired, stressed, and unfiltered.
After a while, we started to feel less like friends and more like family.
There were midnight kitchen hangouts, all of us somehow squeezing into one car for Target runs, eight different playlists echoing through the halls as we got ready, and group sprawls in the front yard with romance novels on towels, chairs, and pillows.
Grocery hauls always somehow ended in a Trader Joe’s taste test, and nights finished with collective yelling at the TV during “Love Island.”
It’s funny, I couldn’t wait to be near the ocean with my best friends. But in the end, the beach was the least interesting part of that adventure.
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