Living in a student house, and sharing said house with four other people who you couldn't pick yourself as housemates can be tricky sometimes. I've been in this situation for 2 1/2 years now and I've had enough.

We live in a terraced house, and my room is the one at the back. This means that the bathroom is right next door, with the pipes running behind my bed. During the day, I don't mind. I can tune out the noises, the click of the light switch, the flushing, the squeaky taps and the banging of the light switch against the tiles if someone's in a hurry.

During the night, that's a different story. I know that when you've gotta go, you've gotta go, but lately someone in the house is quite literally taking the piss. Showers at 2am in the morning during the week. Constant running to the bathroom, banging the light switch, banging the door shut... It's driving me crazy. I hardly sleep as it is, maybe because I stress about university too much at the moment, but this whole bathroom situation has to stop.

There's five of us in this house, 2 journalists and 3 photographers, and the photographers seem to be a clique. Hardly ever do we get the time of day. I was in the kitchen today, walking in on two of them talking. They immediately stopped, and then carried on as if I didn't exist, completely ignoring me. One of them then asked who was leaving the house at 9.30am on Tuesday. "Well, it wasn't you, it wasn't me and it wasn't the other photographer... who else could it have been?" Thanks a bunch.

Sharing a house was meant to be fun... that's what everyone said. And we journalists do have fun toegther, but never in the 2 1/2 years I've lived here did we all host a proper party or go for a night out together. We never watch TV together, we all have our meals separately (there is no dining table, so even if we wanted to we couldn't) and everyone just lives in their room.

I can't wait to move out of this place!! I had my own place before I moved into student accommodation - at least there I knew if I didn't do the dishes, no one did. I didn't have to hide my toilet paper, because it might get knicked if I leave it in the bathroom. If I wasn't in the shower, nobody else was - no queues and nobody waking me up in the middle of the night because they couldn't time their shower so that it wouldn't affect anyone else.

Mind you, once I move out, I will share a house again - but this time with my other half, so I doubt I'll get the silent treatment anymore. We'll talk to each other about what is going on, do the shopping together and actually go out every now and then. It's still a couple of months away, but I can't wait!

Enough is enough... there is just so much anyone can put up with.

You probably know the feeling. You get back home after a period away, and everything seems so normal. Whenever I travel between my two homes (one in Germany, one in England), I always make sure I tidy up before I leave, arrange it in the way I needed things last - then I get back and have to rearrange everything, because it doesn't look right anymore.

I usually leave the furniture where it is, but all the bric-a-brac that's collecting dust on the shelves, the books, CDs, DVDs - everything has to be sorted. Stuff I thought was worth keeping goes into the bin within seconds.

I'm in one of these phases right now, as I've just returned to my student room in a shared house in Carlisle after 5 months away. The mess unpacking creates always gives me an excuse to just continue and move stuff about (after all, all my luggage has to go somewhere) but for a day or two I create a bigger mess than I started with. When I went shopping for essentials on Sunday just after getting back, one of the things I bought was a massive bin bag.

At the moment I'm considering a backyard sale during Freshers' Fortnight, to sell all the surplus. There are things I won't wear anymore, books I won't read anymore and DVDs that I don't like too much but sounded great to start with. Since I always play my CDs on my computer anyway, I might as well sell my stereo...

At least, this time I have a week to settle back in and get everything organised (my life, uni and my room, that is) instead of going straight back to uni or work the next days. My room always looks full, although I don't really have a lot of stuff. The room is just very small, and everything that doesn't fit on the IKEA "Billy" shelf, the small shelf on the wall or inside the chest of drawers has to go on or underneath the desk or under the bed... all those hiding places your mum always checked first when you were a kid and told to tidy up!