3 Rookie Mistakes I Made When Living Alone For The First Time

For the vast majority of us, moving out of our parents’ house is a daunting challenge for the child-like part of us. Of course there’s the freedom and exciting rush of being able to do whatever the hell we want. You now can do whatever you want at whatever time of day. You are completely in charge of the fridge’s contents and are freed from constant nagging from your mom to clean your room.

Granted, having your own apartment is a great responsibility. You must come to terms to with the fact that no one is going to clean up after you and if you don’t wash that towering pile of dishes then you are going to wake up to that same pile of dishes (I know, shocking). Along with the obvious house duties that must done in order to keep the your apartment decent, there are also unspoken domestic rules which most of my friends called “common sense”. I say unspoken because apparently they were so obvious to everyone that they didn’t feel the need to tell me about them. These come in handy when attempting to adult. Without further ado, here are some of the dumbest domestic mistakes my roommates and I have executed during our time in college.

Warning: some of them are astoundedly dumb.

Mistake #1: wine isn’t timeless

First off I’ll tell you the sad story of when I realized that wine is not timeless. My roommates and I opened a bottle of wine to unwind on a casual Tuesday afternoon, as you do. A week later it was still open on the counter, just casually sitting there waiting for someone to drink it. When some people came over and suggested we have wine I pointed out the one that was on the counter. This bright comment bought me half an hour of being roasted by my roommates for thinking that you could drink opened wine a WEEK after it was opened. Honestly now that I’m repeating this story I can safely confirm that if I could have then, I would have joined the roasting against me. In the moment however, I built a weak ass argument to support myself, and here it goes.

My train of thought was the following: in “The Parent Trap” the twins’ dad attempts to win over his ex-wife by pulling out the kind of wine which they also happened to drink at their wedding. He blew off dust because it was so damn old! It had DUST. And from when was this wine bottled? Freaking 1987. Decades later they were drinking this wine all casually and I was being roasted for wanting to drink wine one week later? Well, then again, the cork seemed tightly closed on that one in the movie…

Basically, the clock on the wine starts ticking when you open it, so drink up people.

But you probably already knew that. As I am writing this I am reallyyy noticing that this is not a common mistake.

Mistake #2: if it’s not microwaveable, DON’T MICROWAVE IT

Common sense right? Well not quite. Let’s just say that one day I really wanted to melt a bag of chocolate chips, for a chocolate fondue kind of night. We only own plastic plates because we came to the conclusion early on in the semester that any other material would not be suitable for our level of clumsiness. And before you get all judgmental, I am quite aware that you can’t just microwave any material, and I had heard something about no putting plastics into the microwave.

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But guess what? My sweet tooth and raging sugar levels were not in the mood to ask around the building for a microwaveable plate. So naturally I just popped a plastic bowl into the microwave for about 30 seconds, I mean 30 seconds couldn’t do too much damage. I was proven incorrect when 15 seconds into the microwave cycle a mini explosion occurred in the kitchen. As I frantically stopped the machine and opened the door in a panic, I was met with an unpleasant product. The results? The bowl looked like it had suffered through the Civil War with multiple bumps which resemble craters and the chocolate was completely burnt. I may have still attempted to eat said burnt chocolate…

All in all, just use microwaveable objects.

Mistake #3: Cool down hot kitchen items

After using an extremely hot frying pan we all know how satisfying it is to turn on the cold water and hear the pan sizzle in reaction. Little did I know that people did this not solely for the noise (shocker) but because you need to cool down the pan. Where is this going you may ask? Let me tell you. I had left the blender top in the sink to wash later and was currently finishing up with an extremely hot frying pan. In a rush to meet my friends for brunch, considering I was already 15 minutes late, I threw the pan over the blender lid and ran out the door.

The next day my roommates and I were confused as to why the lid looked like it had been melted down and deformed by a furnace. Half of the lid had melted and looked like droopy plastic. I kept my mouth shut and said it was probably the way the lid was in the first place. Was it a believable answer? No. But my roommates aren’t too picky so we let it be.

What rookie mistakes have you made while living alone? Let us know in the comments below!

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