Lessons learned from apartment life

In my short time as an independently-living 20-something, I’ve moved around a bit. It wasn’t entirely planned. I wasted a bit of money (read: thousands of dollars) in the process of it all. I had some interesting moving experiences… but that’s a topic for a whole ‘nother post. And honestly, if I had to it over, I probably wouldn’t change it. It’s been an adventure. And it’s taught me a lot about survival in our weird world of quirky humans and other earthlings.

But before I begin sharing some of the lessons I’ve learned, some background on the apartments themselves is needed.

In the past four years, I have rented in four different cities and three different states. After graduating college in Tacoma, I took my first job in far-away Indianapolis, young and naïve and nervous. Somehow, four years later, I ended up back in Tacoma. Perhaps I’ll stick around a bit longer this time.

Apartment #1:

Location: Carmel, IN. Carmel is your stereotypical Midwestern, middle-class, family-friendly suburb. As I mentioned in a previous post, it boasts of being the roundabout record-holder of the US, and that’s about as exciting as it gets. The average household contains two slightly-annoying kids, a golden retriever, and a white minivan with a Mitt Romney bumper sticker. And yes, we keep our dog inside the minivan! If you are a Caucasian 3-year-old, you either live in Carmel or wish you were living in Carmel. Research has shown that playgrounds in Carmel are approximately 13% awesomer than the national average. It’s as safe as a booster seat with a double seatbelt, stiflingly pleasant, and oh-so-boring.

Size: 900ish sq feet. Vaulted ceilings. Airy, huge.

Age: Hm, maybe 20 years old? Nothing too extra-ordinary about the age. After all, it’s Carmel, and we don’t do extremes here in Carmel.

Price: ~$900ish/mo (increased slightly after the first year, but I also got a $20 company discount).

Apartment #2:

Location: Boulder, CO. City of outdoor enthusiasts and college kids. I had to learn how to actually drive these things called “hills” and “mountains” while living here because I originally learned to drive in Indiana. It was a pretty cool city (and also pretty tumultuous period of my life), but the apartment itself was fairly non-descript. It reminded me a bit of a dorm-style building. I have no complaints, but no interesting stories about it either.

Size: 450 sq feet

Age: 1950’s

Price: $720/mo, included internet and utilities, but not electric.

Apartment #3:

Location: Seattle, WA (Capitol Hill neighborhood). I grew up in Washington state, but this was the first apartment I had rented here. I needed someplace to live in the short term while looking for a permanent job, and this apartment was fully furnished and offered short term lease options. I could see the space needle from the rooftop. I also lived within walking distance of two of the thrift stores where Macklemore shot his famous music video. Capitol Hill is young and hip. It’s artsy and alive. And if you want to live there for under a grand each month, you need to be okay with living in a dorm-room-sized hole-in-the-wall.

Size: Hahaha. As if they’re going to give that information out! But from what I’ve read about Seattle’s “microapartments”, I’m guessing no more than 200 sq feet. Possibly less.

Age: Brand new.

Price: $800/mo, included internet, utilities, electric, and furnishings.

Apartment #4 (CURRENT!):

Location: Tacoma, WA (Hilltop Neighborhood). Okay, maybe Tacoma is cheaper than Seattle, but it’s DANGEROUS! …Or is it? Tacoma is Seattle’s awkward little brother with low self-esteem. Hilltop is an especially stigmatized area of Tacoma, and its notorious crime problem in the 80’s and 90’s is responsible for the cringeworthy nickname “Tacompton.” But that era has passed. The truth is, Hilltop has quieted down, and I feel reasonably safe living here. But stigma dies hard, and the cost of living here is surprisingly cheap. Perhaps as the stigma fades and more young college grads are drawn to the affordable rent and nearby downtown city, it will become more expensive. Perhaps one day, Hilltop will become the next Capitol Hill. But that time is still distant, I think. And one thing is for certain: Hilltop will never become the next Carmel.

Out of all the apartments in which I’ve resided, this is my favorite (and also, happily, the cheapest!). It’s big and old and filled with charm. The closets are giant, and possibly portals into Narnia, even if they sometimes try to eat me (see point #9). I can see Mt. Rainier from my kitchen window (though it’s mostly obscured by rooftops and trees). I can smell the salty air of the Puget sound from my deck on a windy day.

I love this apartment, and I love this city. A big piece of my heart is in Tacoma. It’s flanked by diverse Puget sound beaches: the Narrows to the west, Commencement Bay to the east, and the lush green forests of Point Defiance at the northern peninsula-tip. It’s where I went to college, and it’s where I’ve done a large amount of my adult growing. Love to the 253!

Size: 850ish sq feet. This place is massive.

Age: 1920’s, I think? It’s old, but I’ve only ever encountered minor problems, like cabinet doors that don’t shut or broken floor tiles.

Price: $600/mo

Whew! I feel tired just thinking about all that moving. It has helped me become a minimalist. It has helped me learn to adapt. And it has helped me appreciate some things that I had previously taken for granted. And perhaps most importantly, it has given me some insights into human nature: the good, the bad, the ugly, the annoying, the stinky, the kind-hearted, and the quirky.

So without further ado…

1- The magical toilet paper fairy does not visit apartments and stock the cupboards before move-in. Sorry. You also will not be receiving any visits from the soap fairy, the toothpaste fairy, the wi-fi fairy, or the food fairy. The heat and electricity fairy may or may not stop by your apartment before move-in, but you probably need to contact them and pay them first.

You would think this would be obvious, but I still seem to happily forget at each move-in. I want to believe.

2- Smoke alarms are here for your safety, and you should never try to disable them. Unless they decide to make ear-piercing beeping noises every minute because the battery is low and you don’t have a replacement battery. OH FORGET IT, those things are immortal. If all else fails, dismantle them from the wall, remove the battery (why are you still beeping???), and shove them in a sock drawer. Use earplugs to sleep and try not to dream about any fires.

3- In-house laundry is a luxury. I really can’t complain, since I have always at least had a laundry facility available in my apartment complex, and so I’ve never actually needed to drive to a laundromat. But my first apartment actually had a washer and dryer in my own unit. You don’t realize quite how luxurious this is until you have to make three trips into the freezing rain to change out your laundry, or be that annoying customer paying for your groceries in the self-checkout in five separate cash transactions because NOBODY WILL GIVE YOU QUARTERS. Having a washer and dryer in your actual apartment unit is right on par with waking up at 4:00 am and then realizing it’s the weekend and going back to sleep for another four hours. Luxury.

4- Designated parking is a luxury. In Seattle, there is a cute little vehicle that drives around and looks a bit like an ice cream truck. Isn’t it adorable? But instead of playing repetitive Christmas music in August and handing out calories of happiness, it hands out parking tickets of sadness. That’s because parking in Seattle is a complex art, and if you try to bend the rules, you WILL regret it.

And if you happen to live along the narrow, steep streets of Capitol Hill, it can be near impossible, even if you own a compact car. Your compact car will develop body image issues next to all the teensie-weensie smart cars. They think they’re so smart! Hmff! You can squeeze into that parking spot too! Or not. You’ll inevitably back up into other cars at 5:00 am in the dark while driving to work because you’re all boxed in. But that’s assuming you can find a parking spot in the first place that isn’t half a mile away in the freezing rain. (The weather is always freezing rain if you have to do laundry or park light-years away from your apartment. Murphy’s law.) But you can’t park too far away, or else you’ll be in the wrong zone! You’ll drive around for 20 minutes, praying to the Parking Fairy Goddess that somebody will move so that you can snag their spot. Somebody, anybody. Even a smartcar.

The only ticket I’ve ever gotten was in Capitol Hill for “blocking an unmarked crosswalk,” which apparently means having your bumper one inch over a spot where a human could potentially cross a street. WELL, IF YOU DIDN’T WANT ME TO BLOCK IT, MAYBE YOU SHOULD’VE MARKED IT, HMM??? What do they think I am, a mind-reader or something?

 5- Transferring your lease to someone else’s name should not be complicated. But it can be. I DON’T EVEN WANT TO THINK ABOUT THAT, DON’T MAKE ME THINK ABOUT IT. My apartment agents were rather incompetent about the whole process. The right hand and left hand could not communicate, and I never heard the same thing twice. I couldn’t have made it more convoluted if I had tried. I am still afraid that I will get a call about how I owe a years’ worth of electric bills from the snowpocolypse in Indiana because oops, we didn’t transfer everything out of your name.

 6- Passive aggressive Lysol wars can be fun but are generally ineffective. There’s lazy, and then there’s never-brushing-your-teeth-or-washing-your-underwear lazy. Leaving your garbage by your back door in the (indoors) hallway for greater than 24 hours falls under the latter. And to make matters worse, it was in August. In the baking hot sun. And it was a repeated offense. When I went out the back door, I was greeted by giant black flies. The hallway reeked. I reached my snapping point when the inside of my own unit began to smell and I noticed a fly inside my kitchen. No. NONONONO.

Saying I am a neat-freak is putting it lightly. I refuse to wear lotion because it could potentially generate fingerprints. No, I am not going to commit a crime – I just can’t stand the smudge marks. It is also why I have never lived with a roommate. It may have made things cheaper, but I honestly don’t think I would have been able to sanely handle it. My apartment is my “safe” spot. It is where I can pretend that the world is orderly and predictable and perfectly-controlled. It is an environment that I control. If I want my hangers in my closet to be spaced equi-distance apart, then SO BE IT! So when I sensed my neighbor’s slobbery invading my compulsively-perfect bubble, I decided that it was most-definitely-NOT-okay. I marched to store and bought two cans of Lysol. One I used to spray down every potentially fly-harboring airspace. And the other, I set next to my neighbor’s door, right next to the garbage bag, which I stubbornly refused to take out.

The next day, I found that the Lysol can had magically migrated to my doorstep. I think the garbage was still there.

7- You do not own anything. “I’m coming home. Home to my apartment.” That has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that sneaky little possessive is a lie that tenants tell themselves to feel more secure about the whole idea described as “having a place to protect your pet, your possessions, and your sense of privacy from fellow human beings.”

I suppose I can’t complain. I’ve never been in an extremely dire situation, only a mildly annoying one. I’ve heard horror stories of landlords being foreclosed and tenants being forced to move out and find who-knows-where to live. For me, it was merely my privacy that was being compromised – but it still disrupted my whole notion of “this is my own space and nobody invades it!” that I had taken for granted.

Capitol Hill, Seattle: everybody wants to live here, even if it means living in a unit with barely more cubic feet inside it than the interior of your Seattle Smart Car. So on the last month of my 3-month lease, I was told that my apartment would become an open house for viewing and to keep it presentable for prospective tenants. I wasn’t asked, I was told. It was a mass email sent to all residents moving out in the next month. I was given show-time hours, which started out at several hours a day, several days a week, and ended up increasing as the month progressed.

Perhaps some people wouldn’t be bothered by this, but the whole concept of other people walking over my space at any hours of the day just made me twitchy. What if I was at work and my cat got spooked and ran out? What if they stole something? What if they’re smuggling drugs? What if they had the flu and contaminated my (very limited) breathing space? WHAT IF THEY LEFT FINGERPRINT SMUDGES ALL OVER? And when I wasn’t at work, I was continually anticipating guests. Keeping my apartment presentable wasn’t an issue – see point #6. But keeping myself presentable wasn’t always something I wanted to do. What if I wanted to lounge around in my PJs or underwear? Nope, can’t do that. Too self-conscious. I should mention that I was working night shift at the time. “Reasonable” hours for the average person were “just-waking-up” hours for me. When they knocked on my door at noon, I answered it in my PJs, purposefully being overly-polite. “I’m so sorry that my bed isn’t made. I just woke up when I heard a knocking on the door. You see, I work graveyard! My apologies again! Here, come inside, make yourself at home…”

 8- Never underestimate the ability for sound to travel through paper-thin walls. I don’t think this one needs much elaboration. I was lucky enough to live without a neighbor immediately adjacent to me for the first two months of my lease in Capitol Hill, but on the last month, it all changed. Remember what I said about how people value a sense of privacy? The keyword is sense of privacy. Privacy feels nice, even when it’s only perceived. Ignorance can be bliss. At least, if you’re the one on the blissfully-ignorant end.

First it was the loud music and talking while I was trying to sleep. I don’t think it was actually all that loud – but I could hear every vibration. Not wanting to actually ask them to keep it down, I tried banging on the walls a couple times, but I don’t think they noticed.

I learned that my neighbor likes Miley Cyrus, pizza, and friendship. I also learned that his bed was situated adjacent to the wall that separates us. And that he really loves his girlfriend! At 3:00 am. And 6:00 am. And 11:00 am… Do you know what it sounds like to wake up to sex from complete strangers that is literally happening six inches away from your ears? I felt like a sleep-deprived pervert. Moving my bed was not an option. Are you kidding? – My bed took up half the square footage in my bedroom! And of course, we were now far, far past the non-awkward stage of politely requests to “please keep the noise level down.”

What do you do? What if you can’t use earplugs because you need to wake up to an alarm? If anyone comes up with a solution to this conundrum, you are smarter than I am.

9- Apartments are living, breathing entities. And I am 67% convinced that they have a soul. Maybe it isn’t obvious on your first apartment. Or second, or third. Maybe you have to wait until you get a really old one. One with charm and character and giant closets that might lead to Narnia. One with stains on the kitchen walls from a mother cooking spaghetti sauce during the great depression. One with secret cabinets that seem to continually appear out of nowhere, as if the apartment is growing new cracks and crevices in its metaphorical xylem. New folds in its grey matter, perhaps.

I don’t believe in ghosts. I believe in legacies. Legacies with hearts that beat with each creaking floorboard.

Apartments, like nature, are neutral. They’re neither particularly benevolent nor malicious in their intents. They are the trees of the city forest, and you feel a bit sad whenever one is torn down, even though you don’t quite know why.

Do old apartments have a sense of humor? Have they gained insights upon human nature with age? Sometimes I wonder if mine is trying to mess with my head.

August 2014. I stepped inside one of my giant walk-in-closets to pick out my clothes for the day. My mother was visiting; she was in the shower. My cat was awake, waiting by the bathroom door, because apparently that’s the place to be and we must stick our paws beneath the door because cats, unlike humans, care nothing about privacy, real or perceived. Unlike my cat, however, I do care about privacy. I have discussed this in great detail and do not think this requires further elaboration.

My closet, though large, is fairly boring on the inside. No magic wormholes, no old artifacts. Just some stinky socks that I got wet at the beach yesterday. I normally don’t use it as a changing room, but my mother was in the bathroom, and some of my windows are curtainless and I didn’t think my neighbors particularly wanted to see me streaking.   So I stepped inside and closed the door to prevent my cat from pushing open the door to join the fun.

Hm, what should I wear? Will it be cold today? I hope I remembered to bring clean underwear. Okay, all done…

The door would not open.

Wait, what? There is a door knob. Surely if I turn it the right way and twist it 360 degrees and keep turning it or screw it in tighter…

There was no possible way to make the door open.

I banged on the door and hollered for my mother to please come and rescue me, hoping to dear God that the door knob on the outside wasn’t broken. She came out in a towel, slightly amused. I was less amused.

So this is how one develops claustrophobia…

I still refuse to set more than one foot at a time inside that closet, for fear that my cat or the wind might shut the door, bringing me a painful death-from-thirst-in-hot-stinky-laundry-closet.

I’m on to you apartment. I respect you. I think we’re cool.