One great thing I have found about living in a Student House in Nottingham, is the ability to throw a great party. Although we have needed to ensure that we don’t disturb the neighbours too much and made sure they relatively small affairs, they have been a great part of student life and one big advantage of choosing to live in student accommodation rather than living at home. I have found that the best parties we have thrown or been to have been ones that have had a theme and have involved some type of dressing up. Having a theme for a party definitely gets everyone in the right mood. I am going to share with you some of my top themes for parties and also where you can get hold of the things you need. This is based on what is available in Nottingham, although I am sure similar things are available in different cities.
The first theme we ever had was a cowboy/girl theme. The idea for this came out of a trip round the 99p shop at the top of the Broadmarsh shopping centre where we stumbled across cowgirl hats for 99p. We were thinking about having a party for one of our housemates birthday and saw the hats and thought they would be great to wear for her birthday. This was an easy theme to do as apart from the hat the rest of the outfit was easy to put together. We all has denim skirts, shorts or jeans and but the time we has plaited our hair and added a few freckles with some brown eyeliner the look was complete. We downloaded a few well known tracks to fit the them such as ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ and ‘5,6,7,8’ to get the party started. The party was well received by all those who attended, who all really went for it with dressing up. One person even turned up on a singing hobby horse! This was the start of themed parties amongst our student friends.
The next party we decided to go for a glam red carpet theme. We created some cheap cocktails (search for cheap student cocktails for ideas) and found some plastic martini and champagne glasses in the pound shop on Lister Gate, Nottingham. Unfortunately, we couldn’t afford Champagne so cheap sparkling wine did the trick. We also found some feather boas and plastic tiaras in pound shops too. The cocktails were very popular and we asked people coming to bring spirits and mixers to add to the collection. We had a great night making cocktails, although I would not recommended throwing bottles like you see the professionals do! Apparently, it is very easy to drop them!
Another popular party we held at our student house was an eighties theme. For this shops like Primark and H&M were great for clothes and pound shops and EBay were good for accessories. A great place to get cheap old CD’s we found is ‘That’s entertainment’ which is located near Tesco’s on Nottingham’s Victoria Centre, This shop sells preowned CD’s and DVD’s starting from about 99p each. We spent about £6 on a few 80’s compilation albums which meant that we could just put them on and not worry about finding suitable songs. We also set up sing star with 80’s tracks which was fantastic entertainment for the night. 
Another great excuse for a party is Halloween. We found lots of shops in town and supermarkets stock lots of stuff to decorate your house cheaply. As budget our budget was tight, we focus on decorating one room in the house to make more of an impact, rather than spreading the decorations we had throughout our house. A friend of ours had an apple tree in the garden of their student house, which provided lots of apples for apple bobbing, which was quite interesting after a few drinks.
We are currently looking forward to our next party and are toying with either a ‘uniform’ or ‘school days’ theme. Hopefully we will find some more bargains in town.
