Living alone is a fantastic thing. I thoroughly enjoyed living at home with my parents but growing older, more independent and after being in a relationship for four years, it was time to “grow up”. Now, 1 week isn’t long enough to learn everything, but I have learnt a lot in the past 7 days.

How to set up bills 📫

Setting up bills these days is pretty straight forward. But, it still can be quite confusing trying to understand all the jargon when setting up new accounts and finding the cheapest provider for the very first time with limited assistance.

Finance and budgeting is something I had under my belt anyway, but knowing how to look for the best deals and how to understand what gas, electricity & water providers actually mean is something I had to figure out this week.

Making the heating work 🔥

Turns out, water needs to be at a set temperature minimum. Also, I’ve never had to play with a boiler before but apparently pressing buttons and hoping for the best kind of works if you want to come home to a cosy flat instead of sitting and freezing while watching the television.

I’m no good with washing machines 👕

No matter how hard I try, I cannot get my head round using the washing machine. Or any washing machine. As I write this there’s a full load needs to be washed, with conditioner and detergent pod sitting in the machine too.

I have the settings on what my boyfriend told me to set it on, and I’ve pressed the buttons he told me to press. Yet, it won’t start. I know this isn’t a machine issue, it’s a user issue. These things just hate me. It’s not like our machine has overly complicated buttons either, we have a dial for which setting we want it on, and a “start” button.

I guess I’ll just stick to doing the washing up and bleaching the bathroom. That is something I can do.

It takes longer than you think to unpack 📦

It’s been a week and I was hoping it would only take a day. Yet there’s still boxes and rooms that need to be organised. I’ll probably also never be 100% happy with how the kitchen cupboards are organised either, but that is a me problem.

My bedroom is a tip and I no longer have the motivation to finish unboxing everything, but I know I need to. I need to hang clothes up, I need to put screws back into drawers, I need to turn my bed around to make more space in the bedroom.

The bathroom needs to be organised and I need to put things in and move things out. I severely underestimated how long it would take me to sort out my stuff, but that’s OK. It will get done.

I’m sure I’ll look back at this time, and get shamed for being nostalgic too quickly, but I’m letting myself both enjoy and hate the experience all at once.

There’s still plenty for me to learn about living alone and being an adult, and I know everyone wakes up each day and pretends to know what they’re doing. I can’t expect to know how to do everything straight away and so looking at it like that, I’ve had quite a successful first week.