After that last post about my hideous neighbors…I figured maybe I ought to say a few words about what I LIKE about my apartment.
1. It has two bedrooms. No, seriously. My last apartment didn’t even technically have one – it was an “open concept” one-bedroom. Which meant: kitchen/dining room and living/bedroom. Fine for me, but inconvenient when having guests, since this also meant I didn’t have a couch. The “guest bedroom” was an air mattress, inflated at the foot of my bed, after all of my living room furniture was pushed out of the way.
2. The bathroom is within the confines of the apartment proper. Again, not a luxury I had in my last apartment, where my bathroom was out in the hall. This meant walking to the shower or going to pee meant entering common space. You have no idea how much you value the privilege of walking from the bathroom to the bedroom naked (or semi-so) until you can no longer do it.
3. It does NOT have an overbearing landlady who lets herself into it without warning and peers around her curtains at my visitors.
4. My building is only one apartment deep. This means I actually have east-facing windows AND west-facing windows, ergo my apartment has excellent sun exposure throughout the day and breezes blow straight through it when the windows are open. I have never lived in an apartment that had decent air circulation without mechanical intervention.
5. I have a dishwasher. Granted, I have to open the fridge door to open it all the way, but dishpan hands are a thing of the past for me.
6. This is the big one…I HAVE A DECK. Growing up, the deck was something I took for granted. It was the site of crab feasts…dinners when the house was too stuffy to stand…it was where my family met one of my college boyfriends for the first time, and where my brother once suggested that maybe I would enjoy photography (he was right). My apartment in grad school had many things going for it: a small gym, hot tub, in-ground pool, tennis courts, nice little trail through the woods for running. But in my last couple of years of grad school, I told myself that my next apartment would have: a) a dishwasher, b) a washer and dryer, and c) some sort of balcony/deck.
Then I decided to move to Toronto.
On my limited budget, I had to make some sacrifices. My little basement apartment did come with laundry privileges, but not a dishwasher. But I made damned sure I would have some outdoor space for my grill. I use my grill year-round, as long as it isn’t buried under snow (and even then, have been known to melt a ring around it when desperate). My Toronto landlady offered the use of their very large grill, hooked up to the natural gas line. I opted to use my tiny Weber Smokey Joe, because I. REQUIRE. CHARCOAL. Landlady hated this. She had a severe aversion to smoke or lighter fluid fumes, so I used that as an excuse to buy the chimney starter I had been wanting for ages anyway. TA-DAH! No lighter fluid! Every time I lit that damned thing on a nice day I heard windows being angrily slammed shut, but there wasn’t anything she could do to stop me, because IT WAS WRITTEN INTO THE LEASE.
And, lest you think I just said, “I need outdoor space for my grill…”
Nope. I specified that it was charcoal. Bitch had full warning, and didn’t have a leg to stand on.
However…I still had to climb the stairs out of the basement…cross their gargantuan 3-season deck (complete with patio heater which made it more like 3.5) and stand out in the freezing cold to use the spot they had given me. So my grilling frequency was less than optimal. It’s hard to throw your meat on the grill, then go work on side dishes, when you spend at least a minute in transit negotiating doors.
So when I looked at this apartment, I saw right past the smell of Pet and ugly-ass cabinets, because there was a big sliding door leading out onto…a proper Deck.
And not some shitty balcony built of cinderblocks that feels like a concrete cage. This is the biggest deck I have ever seen attached to an apartment of this size.
I have room for a patio set.
I can store my recylables and my bike out here.
I CAN GRILL. Just a couple of feet outside of my doors and windows, which means I can do it in nearly any weather. Especially now that I have a down vest for the dashes outdoors in the colder months.
I have a view, not of the next complex over, but of a nice little patch of woods surrounding a drainage culvert. Nature provides a buffer between me and the medical center/retirement complex on my street. It looks kind of like this:
I can garden. Not a lot, but I have tomatoes. I have radishes and lettuce. I have rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley, and two kinds of basil. My garden looks kind of like this:
I. HAVE. FLOWERS.
I have little lanterns with tealights in them. I have an extension cord that allows me to blog by candlelight.
I have delicious, Lake Michigan breezes from the west, and strong afternoon sunlight.
I have:
That’s right. MUTHAFUCKIN’ PRODUCE.
And this weekend, as summer comes to a close, I have UVa football streaming on my computer as the sun goes down and I grill my dinner.
No matter what’s going on in my life…no matter how stressed I am at work or at home…no matter how messy my kitchen or bedroom are…my deck is my oasis. Nothing seems to matter when I’m out here. As long as the plants get watered and the gnome gets paid…
Everything is going to be okay.
