Home Sweet Frat House

Last night here at Williams College we had Room Draw, better known as Annual-Night-of-Despair. For those of you that remember that sweet sweet time of year known as room draw, you can probably agree that it's about as dramatic as it gets. Williams's "random number generator" really screwed the pooch the last three years and I've had less-than-prime housing. This year, I moved into L.'s neighborhood (Williams organizes its housing into four neighborhoods, each on a particular spot of campus with a particular cluster of dorms), Spencer, hoping that us and our friends could live together senior year...depending on our pick number. When we learned we got pick 6 (out of about 130), we had to wonder at first if someone screwed up along the way. We got a good pick? We weren't going to be living in broom closets-turned dorm rooms (yup)? L. wasn't going to have to live in the campus-wide accepted smallest room on campus? (Happened Freshman year).

This was all too much. Within our neighborhood, there were a couple okay options, but the one that stood out immediately was Spencer House, the most desirable senior housing on campus. This is the house that we walked by as freshmen, admiring its slew of common areas, spacious balconies (!) accessible from inside the rooms, and perfect position in the center of campus, and wondering if we'd have to sell our souls to the devil or maybe just mortgage them in order to live there when we were seniors.

And now?

We.Got.It.


Note: This is clearly a staged picture; there is generally a lot less patriotism and strategically-placed rose bushes surrounding the house. But this little beauty is essentially all ours. And that giant, party-ready balcony right there? Ours.

There's a third floor with a handful of doubles, and we don't know the random people living there. But on our floor, the second floor, we managed to somehow get three different groups of our friends who all happened to have the top 6 pick numbers into one super-awesome-giant floor of 12 people who all know each other really well:


The best part is that I get to live in the same building as L. and our guy friends (who live in the 6 suites, the 5 suites, and the 3 suites), but in my immediate proximity (the 2 suites and the 4 suites) are some awesome girls. In fact, Bianca, the girl I worked with at the art museum last summer, is living right in 2B, so we'll get to have a pretty, clean, nice-smelling, and generally ungross common room.

But guys? There's a slight problem. The group og guys who live in the 2 suites now? Well, let's just say they are some less than desirable folk. Like, really shady. We went up to take a look at the rooms yesterday, and it was like a straight-up drug den. For realsies. In my room, 2D, there was no bed, a broken window, broken glass everywhere, bottles and beer cans strewn about, and the smell? Kind of like what I'd imagine a chain-smoking hobo who slept in a keg every night would smell like.

The nice thing about college is that next year when I move in, the magical cleaning college fairies will have come in, patched the walls, removed the smell, fixed the window, and made a bed appear. But knowing it looks like this right now? I'm freaking out a little.

In true renovation spirit, next year that poor, defiled room is going to get a new lease on life. I'm going to take that broken-down 11' x 13' (cynical estimation) white box and turn it into the prettiest room you've ever seen. So wait for that.