House hunting in Athens is a miserable experience. Since college kids are the majority of residents, at least near campus, landlords have the power to raise rent to astronomical rates with literally no consequences. Supply and demand, b*tches. So a few years ago, five of my closest friends and I decided to live together, thinking if we split the cost six ways, we could save a few hundred bucks.
Most places we could afford only had three bedrooms, so we decided we were willing to share, even if it was super cramped. A landlord was telling us about a quaint (read as: tiny and run down) three bedroom house, when we discovered city ordinance 29.17.03, which basically forbids the number of residents to exceed the number of bedrooms advertised for the house. We would never find a six bedroom house in our budget, but living separately was going to be impossibly expensive, too. In the greatest act of intentional rule-breaking any of us had ever committed (yeah, yeah, we're a bunch of squares, whatever), we decided to chance it.
We found a place with five bedrooms, a limited number of roaches and rent that didn’t send us into a collective panic attack. We all held our breath as we asked the landlord how he would feel about an extra person living in the house. Once we convinced him we only wanted the extra person to help with rent, not to host ragers (because six people partying is apparently much worse than five?), he was fine with it. There was an extra storage space that could be transformed into a bedroom, and we all fit surprisingly comfortably in the house. All was well.
Until.
A few weeks into the semester, Roommate #3’s best friend from back home started asking if we had any extra room. The answer, of course, was no, but it was hard to turn a blind eye to her plight. She had been thrown into a lease with total strangers who turned out to be constant stoners, a scene she was desperately trying to escape. Highly aware of how much we were pushing our luck with the whole squatter thing, we took her in.
This brought our running total of hormonal 20-somethings up to seven, and tensions were running high as we squabbled over cupboard space, dishwasher organization and the constant clutter battle being waged against the living room. We were making it work, but it’s safe to say that things were fragile. The last thing we needed was a city inspection and people coming to poking around. So, of course, that’s what we got.
Luckily, the city is required to give landlords a 24-hour notice before inspections, which meant we had one day to make it look like two of our residents didn’t exist. It didn’t have to be perfect, sure, but having a fully furnished, personalized bedroom in a space that was very obviously not a bedroom might be a bit of a red flag.
Roommate #7 shared a room with Roommate #3, so there wasn’t much work to do there, but we spent the entire day ransacking Roommate #6’s fake room. We packed all her clothes into bins and hid them in our rooms, removed any and all photographs or personal items and pushed her mattress against the wall to make it look like actual storage, though who has a spare mattress to store, I have no idea. The worst part by far was transferring and concealing her desk into the back of her van. Awkward and bulky, it stuck out like a sore thumb, but it would have to be good enough. We were out of time, it was 2 A.M. and the inspectors would be there in the morning.
They came the next day and the conclusion of our tale can be summed up nicely with a cruel joke:
How long does it take seven pissed off, stressed out, exhausted college students to dismantle a bedroom?
Five and a half hours.
How long does it take two city inspectors to determine a house is a-okay and fugitive free?
Five and a half minutes.
