Apartment Hunting University Students~ 10+ Phrasal Verbs in Context
- Nick Nantais NEWN
- Apr 1, 2021
- 7 min read
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Hi everyone and welcome back to a new episode of Natural English with Nick. In today’s episode, I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about my experience looking for apartments here in Ottawa. My girlfriend and I have decided that it would be best to find an apartment together to save money and still be in proximity to the university, so we can go to class if we end up having in person classes in the fall. Despite the unlikelihood of classes being entirely in person, given the fact that thus far (so far) all of our classes have been completely online, we still want to find a place relatively close to campus. In today’s episode you are going to be able to learn a ton of super useful vocabulary related to the process of moving houses or in our case apartments. I recommend as always to go check out my website where you can find free transcripts for many of the episodes that I’ll make. This episode will have a full transcription available for free so you can follow along and revisit all the new vocabulary and particular expressions that we are going to use here today so you can see how it’s used in context. Okay without any more delay, let’s get into it!
To give you a coherent timeline of the time I’ve lived away from home, I think it’s best if we start from the beginning. So in late August of last year, around August 29th (twentyninth) 2020, I moved to Ottawa to start my studies at the University of Ottawa. Days before I got here, I realized how much unnecessary stuff I had that I really didn’t need anymore. I guess moving out really helps put into perspective just how fast things can add up. When I was packing up my stuff, I told myself that I was only going to bring half of all the stuff I had accumulated over the years. Luckily, about a month earlier, my mom helped me get rid of a lot of the stuff I didn’t need anymore to clear up some space in the basement where I was living. So in retrospect, I didn't have that much stuff, but it seemed like way more than one person could ever need. So after I managed to give away the rest and find a home for the stuff I wanted to keep. I was set. ( I was prepared) I was ready to go and excited for a new adventure in a new city that I knew very little about. Man ( in this case an exclamatory expression like damn) moving is always a huge hassle. Sometimes you don’t even think about how you’re going to get the stuff there. After you finally find the right place furnished with a functioning toilet and nice interior you just think to yourself “oh my stuff will just magically appear at my new place and everything will be cool’. Not exactly. If you are luckY enough like me to have a friend with a truck and trailer, a moving truck, or an oversized minivan you may be in luck. But even if you don’t have to hire a moving company that will cost you an arm and a leg (cost a lot), you will have to in either case load up all your stuff, take it over, unload it, bring it into the house and then ideally have some friends to help you unpack everything and put everything in its place. So, let’s fast forward ( let’s skip past) the long 7 hour journey it took to get from London to Ottawa. So a little backstory ( additional context to a story), my mom and I decided it would be best for me to stay in a residence building of the university for at least the first year. So, my original plan was not to have to move again until next this September. For those of you who don’t know what a residence building is, it is essentially a glorified hotel with dorm rooms where students live, study, eat, sleep among other indecent activities. A good residence in COVID or non COVID circumstances is supposed to provide basic amenities like functioning electricity, friendly and helpful staff to help you transition into living on your own and a maintenance team that actually comes when you call them, mine did not. But anyways, when we finally got to the residence building, it went pretty smoothly( It went pretty well). I lived on the 13th floor so we had to bring up all my stuff in the elevator. But luckily, since I had come earlier than most students, I didn’t have to wait and we were done in like half an hour. So that was great, I said my goodbyes and unpacked my stuff and after a long day of travels and I hit the sack pretty early and slept like a log. ( figurative, I went to bed pretty early and slept great.)
Okay so let’s fast forward again to the end of the semester so in late December, I decided last minute ( suddenly) that I wanted to move out of residence to go live in an apartment with my roommate and his friends. I figured it couldn’t be much worse than residence; it was pretty boring and solitary. I told my roommate that I would be interested in the last room that needed to be subleased from one of the other roommates whose room I would be taking for the winter semester. I managed to get a sublet from this guy and be able to stay in his room up until August 31th of this year. A sublet is when you sign a contract to pay the rent of a leaseholder for an apartment for a certain amount of time without having to put the lease in your name. I had intended to stay during the summer to work anyways so it worked out great for me. Plus, I must say it turned out to be a great move ( It happened to be a really good decision). I love my current apartment and my roommates are cool guys. The apartment itself is fully-furnished. There are 4 bedrooms plus a living room and two bathrooms. It has a nice modern look, an open-concept (used to describe housing interior; spacious) with lots of lighting and windows. Plus it was about half of what I was paying for residence.
My girlfriend has been staying in an apartment since school started and actually we ended up being even closer to each other after the move which was also nice. Her apartment is only a 5 minute walk from mine so it’s really convenient for when we want to see each other. But it also made us think why pay so much more for our own places when we could split the rent ( divide the rent in two) and live together on our own. I mean since we were so close, we would see each other everyday anyways so we thought that would make a lot more sense. Shortly after we were considering this, Erin’s landlord (a property owner who rents to tenants) told her if she wanted to stay another year, she would have to renew the lease. This is when we made the decision to start looking for places and think more seriously about how we were going to make this happen.
So over the last two weeks, we have been bringing her stuff over ( moving her stuff from her place to mine) to my current place that we’re going to stay in over the summer since my roommates are going home for the 4 months (*that*) we are not in school. I was pretty impressed. I must say Erin has a lot less stuff than me so it hasn’t taken us that much time to get everything moved over.
Now the fun part starts. It’s time to start apartment hunting. We have already viewed one place about 10 minutes away from our current place and it was pretty nice but it also had some issues. The kitchen was super small, and it was kind of outdated and the whole place felt a little crammed ( not spacious). If you’re unfamiliar with the real estate market in Ottawa or Canada as a whole, it is super expensive and in my opinion for what you get, it is not really justified for what you’re paying.Ottawa is no exception. We live close to downtown and it’s hard to find a one-bedroom apartment for less than $1300 a month. Sure if you live in Europe, the states or some countries in the Middle East like the UAE, this is probably no surprise to you and might even be considered cheap. But for two university students, it’s a lot, trust me. Most of the apartments on the market are furnished meaning they come with furniture like dressers, a table set, a couch (sofa is more common in the USA) etc. But unfortunately for us, since we have so much stuff, a furnished apartment isn’t necessarily the “go to” or the easiest option. We inquired about 30 places in the area, but most of them need a close by summer meaning they want someone to sign the lease ( and move in) before fall. This is problematic because we’re still paying rent at our current place until the end of August.
Despite the high prices and high demand for student apartments, we hopefully will be able to find something that works for us at least for this year so we don’t have to put ourselves through anytime soon.
CONCLUSION
That’s all for today my friends, I hope you enjoyed and found it useful. Be sure take a look at the transcript and follow along with the audio. Do some translation of any words or expressions you don’t understand. Read aloud the transcript to improve your pronunciation. Tell your friends about what I offer here at Natural English with Nick because I know how important it is to have this kind of content for your language learning. There is also a link in the description to my website.You can also send me an email at natural.englishwithnick@outlook.com. Tell me where you’re from and if you have any suggestions or ideas for future episodes because I want to create the best content for you guys as possible. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you next Thursday for a new episode. Take care.
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