4:42pm November 2, 2014

Amazing things about my new apartment

It looks like a home. Not a shoebox. Not a dorm room. Not a hospital room. An actual home.

Whoever designed it went out of their way to make it visually attractive. It’s truly beautiful. It even has these amazing wood columns throughout the apartment and the building. Some are left unpainted, others are painted white, all are gorgeous.

The walls have paneling part of the way up and then flat above that. Also gorgeous.

The square footage is smaller in this two bedroom apartment than my old one bedroom apartment. But the space is used more intelligently so it feels bigger. Much bigger.

The bedrooms are at opposite ends of the apartment. Once I get a roommate we can, if we wish, do our own thing in our rooms without intruding too much on each others space even in an auditory way.

The apartment has closets. One for each bedroom. My old apartment had no closets.

The smaller bedroom has two windows. If it weren’t for the need for space for my medical equipment, I would actually have taken the smaller bedroom. I don’t know why, I just like it, they managed to make it appealing despite being utterly tiny.

The toilets flush. As in, you only have to flush once. No more having to throw the toilet paper in the trash because it won’t flush without a serious fight. (Low flush toilets are not eco-friendly, not when it takes that many flushes to get anything remotely solid to go down. You don’t want to know the things we had to do in my last place.)

The ceilings are incredibly high. This contributes to it feeling more spacious than my old place. It also means more storage space, just stack stuff higher.

There are ceiling lights in every room, and they are indirect enough not to set off my migraines. No more lighting nightmares.

There are light blocking shades on every single window. Again, no more lighting nightmares.

There are ceiling fans in every room. Controlled by a knob next to the light switch.

There are more power outlets per room than I’ve ever seen.

The bathroom is fully wheelchair accessible with a roll-in shower and a shower chair that folds down off of the wall.

The bathroom has a medicine cabinet. Which I don’t need for medicine, but any storage space is great as far as I’m concerned.

I keep feeling like this is too good to be true, that I’ll be forced back into a crappy apartment or worse. I think this may be the best home I’ve ever lived in, ever in my life.

I don’t know how to explain this, but buildings and apartments have personalities. I have always been able to sense that and interact with them. The first house I ever lived in was physically in terrible shape by had a good personality. The second house was in better shape but had a mediocre personality. The third was big, but in bad shape and even worse personality, so bad that from a young age I would endure things I normally hated, just to spend a night away from that house.

My other apartments have had personalities that never rose above mediocre. And my last one didn’t want me living in it, which became especially obvious towards the end.

This apartment actively welcomes me, wants me to live here, and is very open and friendly. It reminds me strongly of my friend Anne’s house. It responded very well to my initial response to it, which was to move my shrine over before moving anything else, and set it up in the middle of the living room. That seemed very important. And the shrine and the apartment responded very well to each other. It was after I moved the shrine that I realized how little I belonged in my old apartment. The shrine had been somehow overriding the way I didn’t fit in with that apartment, and when it was gone, it just became apparent that I should leave too.

Actually the entire building I lived in had a bad personality and a terrible reputation around town. The individual apartment I had was not awful like the building, but it wasn’t good either.

Another great thing: Despite being a ground floor apartment, the front door opens into a hall and there are several more doors before you get outside. This means Fey would have a really hard time getting outside. That had been my only worry about a ground floor apartment.

So I’m very happy here despite a few problems that have cropped up (kitchen sink won’t drain, flooded) I never want to leave and am only fearful that for some reason I’ll be forced to. Because things this good rarely happen to me.

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