Things I’d Forgotten about Living in a Real House
My previous apartment was, not to put to fine a point on it, a dump.
It was the kind of place you expect a writer’s first apartment out in the world to be: flimsy interiors (redone in the late 1970s, mostly with plastic), molding plaster, glitchy plumbing, and a real SOB of a landlord.
My new place is none of those things. It is by and large a very pleasant space, and if it sometimes takes a few weeks for non-emergency maintenance requests to get taken care of, the landlords are at least nice about it, and do not grumble or blame us for things beyond our control or try to screw us out of money for reporting the problem.
But it is in a house (a real house, not an apartment building), and that takes a little getting used to.
For one thing, we have a driveway rather than an enormous parking lot. And my roommates don’t drive stick, so I was up at 7:00 this morning to move my car… (This is not actually as big of a downgrade as it sounds, however, as the last place’s parking lot featured a grade that would be illegal on most U.S. Highways, and transformed into an Icy Death Slalom as soon as it snowed.)
Similarly novel is the concept of having one hot water heater for the whole building. I am reasonably sure the fluctuating water temperature during my shower was caused by my own load of laundry — hoist by my own wet, slippery petard.
But we’ll get the hang of it. And in the meantime, instead of living in a reeking, mildew-infested dump and fending off small claims court threats, I am sipping tea and eating freshly-buttered pretzel rolls on the turret sun porch here:
Life ain’t so bad as all that.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my petard is kinda slippery. Going to see someone about that.
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