Hot and Cold Running Blather - There, But Sadly Not Back Again

Hot and Cold Running Blather - There, But Sadly Not Back Again

Professor Liddle-Oldman

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There, But Sadly Not Back Again

[Jul. 11th, 2009|04:59 pm]

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burning down the house

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We have been apartment hunting.

We realized, today, that all adventures begin with the protagonist being thrown out of their lives and into the Night World. This, thus, can be thought of as an adventure. We’re trying to reframe. Unfortunately for that effort, I can’t help but remember the words of a fellow who was certainly propelled out of his home and into a different world, without even any spare handkerchiefs. “Nasty things, adventures, make you late to dinner.”

We looked at one place last night and three today. The first two got an immediate “So Much No” as soon as the rental agent was out of range. The first, the first floor of a two-family in Watertown, wasn’t horrible, but the entire apartment tilted toward the back (“If you dropped something, you’d always know where to look!” suggested my wife in a bright voice), and the stairs downstairs were lethal – high, narrow, and unlighted – and the whole thing was a bit grimy. The first one today was a condo in a newish building, and it would be nice for a single person with no furniture and only two pairs of socks.

We looked at two more that are more possible. One was the first floor of a turn-of-the-century (and not this century); unfortunately revamped by the same sort of people that worked on our current place – that is, poor and tasteless – but with a small bedroom, a big bedroom, and a weird side room that would make a fine office/computer room.

And then the landlady mentioned that there was an apartment open in the building across the street, too.

We had been staring at it earlier. It’s pretty obvious that the original house burned down (turned out it had been the landlady’s grandparent’s) and someone had built the most different house possible. It had the Bauhaus/Le Corbusier stink all over it, but we took a look anyway.

To my astonishment, it dated from the 1970s – I would have guessed 20 years earlier. And, weirdly, it’s so far the frontrunner.

It was designed and built by an engineer, and looks just like that. But the rooms – not bad living room and three good-sized bedrooms – are well-laid-out, roomy, uncluttered, and have 12-foot ceilings with beam and beadboard. We could easily fit a lot of our stuff and a fair bit of he library in. And it’s full of closets.

The bad part is that it was designed by an engineer, and the materials reflect that, too. The outside walls are cinderblock; many of the interior walls are brick; and the remaining ones are some sort of Formica board. The windows are few and tiny. But we might be able to work with this, and once we have bookcases and all the art in, a lot of the walls will be covered. (We have to find a way to hang pictures that doesn’t involve nails, though.

We have an appointment to look at a place near our current house, in a really nice-looking Victorian, and we’re trying to get a line on a different apartment down in Adams Village. After that we’ll confab.

The problem is, a week from today we’re going to New Hampshire – we already paid for the cabin, and we can’t get our money back, so we may as well go – and we need a place to live starting August first. We don’t have a lot of time to work with. I’m thinking that we can possibly move, and then start looking for a more perfect apartment; we shall see.

We still very seriously do not want to move, but at best we’d have to pack up and live somewhere for several months; and at worst, as Janet pointed out (and so far the worst has always happened in this disaster), our current landlord will go bankrupt and lose the house, and banks always evict all the tenants when they repossess. (I have no fraking idea why.) (Though I did point out that we might be able to pick it up at a distressed price at that point.) Moving is certainly the most intelligent choice, looked at dispassionately, but I still purely do not want to.

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