Few things unite the College of William and Mary’s student body like housing-related horror stories. For the residents of Pine, Oak and Cedar Halls in the new West Woods housing complex, the horror this semester involved bugs, construction workers and a shuttle that no one really trusted.
After weeks of creative temporary housing at the Woodlands Hotel, Richmond Hall and the Green and Gold Village, students in Pine and Oak Halls have finally unpacked and settled into their permanent dormitories.
Before moving into Pine Hall, Kristin Bracht ’29 said she endured classic GGV moments on her all-girls floor of the janky but beloved dorm Griffin D. Things in Griffin D, classically, never worked.
“We’d bombard them with emails for them to come fix our AC,” Bracht said.
She also described her and her floormates’ futile attempts to use the kitchen.
“We saw like six cockroaches on the floor, and they were all scurrying around and we were like, ‘Okay, I guess we’re not baking our cookies.’ We ate the raw dough,” Bracht said.
If all that wasn’t enough, she learned through the grapevine that some of her neighbors weren’t super conventional.
“I didn’t know this, and they didn’t advertise this at all, but apparently the construction workers were living in Griffin A, which is insane,” Bracht said. “There’s a specific stairwell that was blocked off because they didn’t want you to interact with the construction workers, I guess.”
The girls had seen the workers hanging out in the lounge and assumed they were just really dedicated to the cause.
The College helped with most of the mid-week move between dorms, which began before fall break for Pine residents, but Bracht said she still had her own furniture walk of shame.
“When we did it specifically, D Chi was throwing a party. We were walking past an active D Chi on-campus frat party as I was carrying my ottoman,” Bracht said.
Bracht is now among the rest of the GGV survivors, along with, apparently, the construction crew. She found herself appreciating even the lows of living in Griffin.
“There were like 16 girls on my floor, and now I know them all really, really well,” Bracht said. “I don’t think that would have happened if I just started out in Pine.”
Now finally moved in, she enjoys the added entertainment of sophomore neighbors.
“There’s no upperclassmen on my floor, but I’ll see some hotties in the elevators, which is pretty fun,” Bracht said.
Baseball players and new Pine residents, Tyler Kelly ’28 and Jamie Laskofski ’28, weren’t as aware of the dormitory’s demographics.
“There’s freshmen there?” Laskofski said.
The roommate pair spent the first few weeks of the semester living more comfortably at the Williamsburg Woodlands Hotel — a ten-minute drive or a humbling hour-long walk from campus.
“I was lucky I had a car because the freaking people of Woodlands had to shuttle bus to campus every day, and that just sounded like the most annoying thing,” Laskofski said.
As athletes, Laskofski and Kelly said living near Kaplan Arena now is prime real estate. They’re also excited for more team playdates.
“I can just walk over to somebody’s dorm and hang out with them now, which is a million times better than it was at Woodlands,” Kelly said.
Laskofski agreed on the benefits of finally living on-campus near his teammates.
“We all walk together, and it’s kind of like a little happy group that we have,” Laskofski said.
Pine’s attached new dining hall, which will eventually connect to the dorm, seemed promising to Kelly, who was happy about the prospect of not having to get dressed to grab a meal.
“You don’t have to go outside. You can just walk down, if it’s cold, in a T-shirt and shorts to just get a bite to eat,” Kelly said.
Laskofski, on the other hand, was more sentimental about losing Commons Dining Hall.
“The new dining hall better be freaking unbelievable because I don’t really want to lose Caf,” Laskofski said. “I walk in there and they know my omelet order.”
Football players and roommates Sam Braidwood ’28 and Michael Kabban ’28 were placed in Richmond Hall and moved into Oak Hall the week after fall break. They’ve since enjoyed complaining about both dorms. They said Richmond’s other residents included spiders and other unwelcome insects.
“There was a black widow above my bed before I was about to go to sleep,” Braidwood said.
Kabban agreed that Richmond had its issues.
“Lots of spiders. The rooms were big, but they were really moldy and dirty. I probably wouldn’t want my kids living in there,” Kabban said. “We ended up washing our hands in the bathtub.”
While the College provided a complimentary moving service between dorms, the baseball players opted to move themselves in.
“I just put all my stuff in a couple of bags, threw it in my car, just moved in the next day, and then kind of called it a day,” Laskofski said.
Kabban and Braidwood, on the other hand, had a bit more faith in the College’s movers to help them out between practice and class — and came to regret it.
“My refrigerator got very, very scratched up in the moving process, which is really disappointing,” Kabban said.
And when they finally got to Oak?
“Yeah, we got catfished like a motherf—er,” Braidwood said.
Kabban went into more detail on his grievances.
“They lied to us multiple times about when the dorm was going to be done. They weren’t honest about the pictures of the dorm. They tried to hide what the dorm looked like until right before it was done,” Kabban said.
As members of the football team, Braidwood and Kabban have been the subjects of multiple dormitory moves during their time at the College.
“We’ve had to move seven times in the past year and a half,” Braidwood said.
He felt even the living conditions with their brothers in the Sigma Pi fraternity house would have been better. Oak wasn’t the home they’d been looking forward to.
“I can’t sleep without my feet hitting the roof,” Kabban said. “We lived in Pleasants, which was arguably the worst dorm, bottom of the barrel, and I would genuinely rather stay in Pleasants than where we’re at right now.”
Kabban was passionately nostalgic about his freshman housing in “P-block.”
“They spent way too much effort and money destroying and getting rid of Pleasants when they could have been spending the manpower and the money actually finishing our dorms for people to genuinely have a decent place to live,” Kabban said.
Kabban’s favorite aspect of Oak was actually not the absence of spiders.
“We got free acai bowls,” Kabban said. “That was kind of tough. We love acai.”
Other students expressed excitement over Oak and Pine’s beautiful study rooms and bright common areas.
For Bracht, the shiny new dorms are the light at the end of the tunnel. She traded in a broken AC and cockroaches for clean kitchens and a skybridge.
“I kind of earned Pine,” Bracht said. “I kind of went through the rough part to get to the good part.”
