The other night I was chatting to my cousin on the phone, and she was telling me all about the recent party her housemates had in her student house. Anna’s only 19 and now she’s at university she’s discovering for the first time the trials and tribulations of living in a shared house!
It seems that one of the boys she lives with decided to invite everyone he knows round for a house party to celebrate his birthday, and as students and young people generally do, they consumed vast quantities of alcohol and food. A lot of drunken antics ensued, and in the course of the evening several drinks got spilled. It was only when Anna resurfaced late the next morning that she discovered a massive red wine stain on the sofa, along with various grubby food marks. Apparently she’s spent ages with a stain remover trying to scrub the upholstery clean, but she hasn’t been able to get rid of it completely. If only she’d used a slipcover!
Her other housemates don’t seem worried about it – after all, the sofa belongs to the landlord and not them. But Anna is fed up with cleaning up the boys’ mess and is rightly concerned that the landlord might charge them for damaging his furniture. I of course suggested she buy some cheap sofa slipcovers to protect the sofas from future spillages, as it’s going be cheaper in the long run to buy a couple of slipcovers than to have to pay to get the upholstery professionally cleaned. She also liked the idea of being able to put a dirty slipcover in the wash after a party, rather than spending the day after on her hands and knees trying to clean the upholstery!
Speaking to her actually reminded me of my own student days, and how the landlord took a big chunk from our bonds at the end of term to pay to get the sofa and chairs cleaned – if only I’d known about ready made slipcovers then!