When I decided to go to grad school, my parents got all excited about potentially finding me a house. My older brother bought two houses when he went to grad school (a duplex and a fourplex), and he rents out almost all of that. It's worked out well for him, so they told me I should consider the same.
I ultimately decided to live with housemates instead of finding my own place. Part of it was a time factor; I didn't want to spend a bunch of time flying to Ann Arbor to find and close on a house. The other part of it is a social factor. Sometimes, I have a hard time meeting new people, and I thought it would be nice to live with people who weren't in my program.
Don't get me wrong -- for the most part, I do enjoy my housemates. I've met some cool people, and it's nice to have someone else around if you lose your keys or need a ride to the airport.
On the other hand, it's a big pain to share certain spaces. I'm not so picky about the bathroom -- I take most of my showers at the gym -- but the kitchen is a sore spot for me. I'm extremely careful about my kitchen implements, and it bothers me when people don't respect my things in the same way. I like to wash my dishes immediately, and I always wipe up the kitchen when I'm done (clean counters and an unblemished stove are a beautiful sight). My housemates aren't horribly messy, and I realize I could have done MUCH worse, but it's just that balancing act of having to live with other people and deal with their little slipups. When I lived on my own, it didn't matter if I decided to take a night off from washing dishes. However, when you live with 5 other people, you could have dirty dishes almost every night if people rotated their night off from dishes.
Tonight, I spent two hours cleaning up the kitchen (and this is after my Thanksgiving cleanup from all the cooking mess we made yesterday). A good majority of this time was spent cleaning out the fridge. I didn't notice it so much, but several of my friends remarked on a strange smell coming from my fridge. Ultimately, I discovered liquefied salmon and moldy onions in the fridge. This was definitely the source of the smell. Since I emptied the fridge anyway, I scrubbed the whole thing out.
It's times like these when I really consider living on my own. There's just something beautiful about having a space that is completely mine to care for without worrying about what other people might do. Rent for one bedroom places in Ann Arbor isn't fun, so I'm reconsidering owning. I talked to my brother, and he suggested looking for a house that has a mother-in-law apartment; I could live in the MIL apartment and rent the house itself out. Sounds intriguing, and I would like to look into it. Not sure where to start, but perhaps a trip to the library for some home buying books is in order.