Signing a flat is exhilarating.
I think it’s just part of that ‘grass is always greener’ mentality: throughout the year, you notice more and more things wrong with your living conditions that make it all too easy to glorify your digs for next year. Whether it’s a shitty bathroom, living with two hundred other students in halls and having zero personal space or finally getting rid of that one weird flatmate, signing that dotted line feels like more than a new lease on a house. It’s a new lease on life itself. So, congratulations! But there’s one final hurdle: room selections.
I’m not sure whether the architects of Dunedin were participating in some mass conspiracy, but you’re more likely to ride a unicorn than find a flat where all bedrooms are the same size. It’s probably something to do with decades of landlords subdividing, extending, and squeezing another rentable bedroom into any patch of floor capable of fitting a mattress, but that's a conversation for another day.
After committing yourself to a year-long contract, you might get some post-signing clarity. You might look back at the pictures you all took when you viewed the place, and realise that one room is actually quite small. When that ‘When are we deciding rooms?’ text comes, you might feel a pit in your stomach. You might try to gaslight yourself into thinking that paying an extra $10 to not take that room wouldn't be so bad.
But today I’m here to make a far less disheartening case: why you should actually put your hand up for the small room. Or, at the very least, why you shouldn't fear it.
Take it from a seasoned survivor – I spent a year in a room only a couple centimeters wider than my queen bed, and I genuinely had the time of my life. Sure, once all my furniture was in there I could barely sit on the floor, but what the room lacked in square meterage, it somehow made up for in charm. While everyone else saw the tiny room as the flat’s obvious short straw, I’d become a lot less defensive about it by the end of the year.
So I’m here to end the victim mentality of small-room residents across Ōtepoti and give you some advice. Your room is not a punishment. It's a challenge.
Do a random room draw
I’ve been in flats that talked everything out to decide rooms, and flats where we left it entirely to chance. Having seen both sides, I’m firmly pro-random draw. It’s easy to think that if you’re all good mates that you can just talk it out – and sometimes you can. But it’s also easy for one person to get pressured into taking the hit for everyone else. Someone says they “don’t really mind” the shitty room, and everyone gratefully accepts this information, and nobody thinks about if they actually don’t mind. That’s especially true with a new flatting group where everyone is still trying to keep the beef at bay before you’ve even moved in.
My tiny room came from a random draw, huddled around a spinning-wheel app in Te Mātiti. When my name landed on the smallest room, there was that brief, horrible moment of mourning. Around 30 seconds later I was over it.
Nobody had screwed me over. Nobody had won an argument at my expense. It was just luck. From that point on, the tiny room became something I had to make the best of, and that mindset genuinely changed everything. I went into the year determined not to spend 12 months feeling like I’d been sentenced to solitary confinement, and somewhere along the way I stopped pretending to like my little room. Instead, I started to love it.
Get storage smart
Despite many of us moving islands and travelling thousands of kilometres to university with little more than a suitcase, it somehow takes only a couple years to accumulate an astonishing amount of shit. Nothing makes you confront this fact quite like moving into a room half the size of your old one. If the room doesn’t have built-in storage, that’s double homicide.
A tiny room does, however, force you to reckon with your own hoarding tendencies. Take it as your opportunity to finally go through your wardrobe, sell things on Depop or Marketplace, donate them, or palm them off to the next tenants. If freshers are taking over your flat, even better: one student’s trash is a fresher’s treasure. Then get clever with whatever survives the purge. Furniture with built-in storage is your best friend, and the closer something comes to being a TARDIS, the better.
Conveniently, the end of the year sees half of Dunedin desperately trying to offload furniture before leaving town, so there’s usually a bargain nearby. I also recommend hitting up Te Oraka’s annual flatting goods sale at the start of the year. In the end, there’s something weirdly satisfying about knowing where everything you own goes. A small room forces you to curate it: there simply isn't enough floor space for you to keep the things you only sort of like or just use occasionally. You end up genuinely loving everything you own.
Find new ways to appreciate the space
Like a washed up celebrity, you only appreciate what you no longer have. When you’ve moved into a room that means you can barely fit two mates in it at once, you start to appreciate the space differently. Gone are the days of dance parties or elaborate furniture layouts. In its place, you start noticing the weird things your room does have.
Mine had massive windowsills. Sitting on one just about became my favourite past time in my room – and who the fuck would think to do that if your room could just fit a chair. I’d eat there, people-watch there, occasionally sit there contemplating whatever crisis had consumed my life that week. If I had been able to fit literally any other sort of sitting furniture I would never have been forced to find a creative place to sit that wasn’t my bed.
That’s part of the charm of a tiny room. You learn every centimeter of it. You find the nice patch of afternoon sun, work out exactly how to shuffle between the bed and the drawers, and develop an intimate relationship with whichever corner has the only accessible power socket. There is a saying that good things come in small packages, and I see no reason why that shouldn’t be extended to bedrooms.
Get rid of your desk
It’s pretty impressive that nearly every bedroom in North D has a desk in it, considering how few people actually study in their rooms. Unless you’re a microinfluencer making a ‘day in my life’ and performatively flexing how locked-in you are, think about how many hours you’ve spent studying in your flat compared with the library, campus, a cafe, or literally anywhere that isn't a metre away from your dedicated doomscrolling space (bed).
I kept a desk in my tiny room for the entire year, and it’s probably my only regret. It ended up as a glorified dumping ground for cups, clothes, and every miscellaneous item that usually sat at the bottom of my backpack. If your room is genuinely tiny, ask yourself whether you actually need one. The places where you work and rest should probably be kept separate anyways. Treat your room like your sanctuary.
The best part of having limited space is that everything has to earn its place. Your bed? Essential. Drawers? Essential. A lamp you found on Marketplace that makes the room look sexy? Arguably essential. Giant desk you sit at twice a semester? We can negotiate on that one.
Know you’ll be winning by winter
Many flats with egregiously tiny rooms tend to also be egregiously old due to all the various renovations. This seems unfortunate until the good old Dunners winter arrives.
My flatmate next door had a room roughly three times the size of mine. He also ended up having to use a sleeping bag to keep warm in winter, despite the flat being double glazed. Meanwhile, my shoebox became tropical approximately ten minutes after turning on the lounge heat pump. I probably used my personal heater fewer than ten times that year, and when I did there was a beautifully narrow window between feeling pleasantly warm and accidentally creating a sauna.
Suddenly, all that extra space starts looking a little overrated and costing a lotta power. The small room enjoyer is warmer, your heater only has like four cubic metres of air to fight against, and your contribution to the power bill becomes wondrously low. You may have a small room, but you definitely didn’t draw the short straw.
Romanticise the small room
If you’ve ended up with a small room, the worst thing you can do is sulk about it. Your room is still your sacred space, free from anyone else. Whether it’s huge or small doesn’t matter. And once you stop using those labels and start thinking of it as your room, it gets a lot easier to love.
By the end of the year, I was weirdly attached to mine. I loved the massive windowsill, how warm it was in winter, and the fact that I could reach almost everything I owned without getting out of bed. Put some shit on the walls, make it cosy, and lean into the shoebox of it all. You might be surprised how much you miss it when you leave.
