Home sweet(ish) home

So, let’s talk a bit about our new place. As I probably mentioned on this blog, we have yet to sell our house in Charleston. Since we’re floating our mortgage and all the attendant bills in SC, we decided to rent an economical apartment until we either sell our house at a loss, rent out our house, or slit our wrists. Funnily enough, renting is the worst of those options. So, we ended up in an aging “condo” on a main drag in the community in which we want to live eventually, Shaker Heights. Don’t be fooled, it’s not a condo. It’s an apartment, a marginally renovated apartment in a building constructed in the 50’s, perhaps. It’s a two bedroom, 1½ bath, 1200 square foot space. Here are some of the pluses of our apartment: there are many closets and they are inexplicably huge. I say inexplicable because in other respects the space planning here is crazy, but the closets are enormous. With those and a storage unit we rented to house my books and bookcases and our food storage temporarily, we actually fit into our space, though only just. And the apartment is a steal, with all utilities included, and it’s right on the rapid line and walking distance to the library and a grocery store and indoor parking is also included.

Be sure to remember these pluses as I enumerate some of the minuses of our new home: the “kitchen” could more accurately be referred to as a nook; the furnace (which we supposedly control) is quite enthusiastic, and it’s usually 78 degrees in the living room; the halls smell like, umm, flowers in an old folks’ home?; there are loud, LOUD snorers upstairs whom I can hear over the noisemakers AND the baby monitors (I mean, we live right next to an electric train track and the train doesn’t wake me up but this person or persons’ snoring is that disturbing; the bedrooms, in contrast to the living room, are often freezing, so the poor boys are always bundled up at the beginning of the night and then whimpering with cold sometime later; and we don’t have a washer/dryer in our apartment and instead there is a coin-operated laundry up half a flight of stairs which I am allowed to use on Fridays or Saturdays…insert withering sigh here. I could go on.

In sum, what our apartment lacks in character, privacy, size, and convenience, it makes up for in location and cost. And, really, it’s fine, and we’re going to be fine, too, for the duration of our lease. Afterwards, whether we rent or buy in the future (and we’re leaning toward renting; see the loss we mentioned above), we’ll find a lovely place with lots of light and few smells and turn of the century architecture and a basement playroom and it will be fabulous. Until then, you can sleep on the boys’ bunk beds. They’ve even got mattresses now, though it makes no difference to Baby E; he’s still sleeping in the nice, cozy closet!