This old apartment

Once graduated from UW good and proper, no-take-backs style, I began to feel a pressing need to get the blue fuck out of the University District. Make no mistake: the UD is where the action is, provided you are in college. But once you’re not in college, the hordes of college kids running around, making a ruckus at all hours of day and night, making all the same mistakes you made years earlier, and generally doing the college thing start to make you feel out of place. All the things that indicate one’s presence in the UD — a cluster of drunkards on a front porch smoking cigarettes under a colored light bulb, the nightly exodus of mini skirts to Greek Row, the sudden surge of population around the end of September — and which used to make me feel right at home now smack strongly of past-ness. The UD is where you live to go to college and be around others doing the same thing, and after graduation you can live in that world as an interloper at best. So I made the call to leave my apartment of three years and home of five, packed up, and moved to the Hill. That particular process was absolutely horrendous, just like I knew it would be, but that will be the topic of a future post.

Before continuing, I should mention that Nathan and I broke up. We had some very good years together, but seeing as how we now find ourselves with different plans and financial situations, it didn’t make sense to sign another year-long lease together. Specifically, Nathan plans to travel aimlessly around the globe beginning in January, and my corporate job doesn’t allow for that sort of whimsicality, at least not until I prove myself essential to the company. In classic Nathan style, he didn’t reveal his intent to globetrot until we began in earnest to find a new place, roughly six days before our old lease ended. Sigh.

I found my new place through an ex-English professor who has now moved out but used to live on the same floor as me. Something about living in the same building as someone I know holds a tremendous appeal, which helped overcome any reservations I had. Plus, I found it four days before my lease ended, and even if I had had time to deliberate, that’s really not my style. It’s just a block from Harborview, surrounded on all sides by construction sites and government housing. It’s not a terribly nice neighborhood — I left Kelly’s car parked a block from my building, and some crackfiend desperate for a fix broke the window to steal her $20 CD player — but the apartment itself is spectacular. I have 950 square feet to my lonesome. All the floors, except for the kitchen and bathroom, are hardwood. The ceilings are over 10 feet tall. I have, for the first time in my life, a dining room (which is also the office). It’s in a great location besides the crackfiends, just a fifteen-minute walk from both my work and Pike Place. But what I like most about the place is its character, also known as “Old World Charm.”

The building was built in 1920, and it shows. My new home has a number of features which other people would call “defects” but which I prefer to think of as “lovable quirks.” For instance:

None of the electrical sockets are grounded, i.e.: they have only two holes instead of three. I asked my managers what to do about this, seeing as how my lifestyle requires lots of power strips, and they just told me to buy a two-to-three-prong converter. When I pointed out that, since the building itself isn’t grounded, this is purely a cosmetic fix and probably a fire hazard, they just looked at me blankly. No fires yet!

None of the windows have screens, and the glass in the panes is rippled enough to create visual distortion when looking out of one. They’re the old kind of window that opens upwards with the aid of counterweights, and they are rad. The no-screen thing has led to a bit of mosquito problem, though. Who would have thought downtown Seattle would have mosquitoes?

Instead of a fan in the bathroom, I have a little hatch near the ceiling that opens into a central air shaft. When I’m in there doing my various bathroom activities, I can hear everything going on in the other apartments which share the shaft — which is cool, except that the reverse is probably true as well. While we’re on the topic of the bathroom, the tub is free-standing and needs two shower curtains to enclose.

The wiring in the building, besides not being grounded, is a little precarious. I have a fuse box with fuses bigger around than my thumb that I may have to change someday if I decide to dry my hair while toasting a bagel or something. I can’t help but feel that I’m heading for a blowout, given that when I toast anything in the kitchen, the lights dim until the toast pops up. When the fridge kicks on, the entire apartment suffers a temporary brownout while the circuits adjust to the increase amperage. I have, at present count, five electrical appliances plugged into the single socket in the kitchen, but I don’t really feel like putting the fuses to the test by turning them all on at once. But what happens when I have to make coffee, grind another batch, microwave a cup that’s gotten cold, make a smoothie, and toast a croissant while opening the fridge? It’s bound to happen someday.

The only thing I really don’t like about the new place is that there’s no dishwasher, but even that’s good in a bohemian sort of way. The fast heat-up on my gas range and oven, manufactured in 1930 with a built-in griddle, more than makes up for the clean up.

If someone wants to send me a house-warming present or other mail, the address here is: