Thump thump thump thump
January 28, 2008
There’s something almost transcendent about working on computer stuff and listening to techno music, that beat driving you with whatever you’re doing. It also helps that I’m downing a Grande skinny cinnamon dolce latte from Starbucks as my first dose of caffeine of the day, so that’s likely helped my blood get pumping a bit, too.
On second thought, let me advance the track. Yeah, I guess it’s just the caffeine. No wonder I was mentally slouching so much.
I think Hanne and I have found our apartment. It met all of our “must have” standards and touched all but one of our “well, we’d like it but we can live without it” standards. We even met a couple of our “someday we’d like” standards, so I think that we’re coming out OK in the end. We put down a deposit on the place and are simply waiting to hear back from the landlord after she’s checked our references for the final approval. I’m excited, though. Not only do I get to move to a badass new apartment that’s only three and a half blocks away from where I am now, but I officially get to move in with my girlfriend. It’s going to be an interesting experience one way or another.
But, the apartment. It’s a 1919 house that’s been turned into a duplex, and Hanne and I have the main/ground floor. The outside is in excellent shape save for the rear of the house that needs painting, and the inside has been taken very good care of over the years. It has all hardwood floors, the original kitchen with a 1930’s Perfection electric range (but a brand new side by side fridge with ice and water dispensers), the dining room that could double as a bedroom, a big back bedroom, a huge entryway, and a big living room with a wood fireplace. There’s a little bit of storage in the basement, plus a washer and dryer for our use. I don’t even have to go outside anymore to get into the basement! We have a door that leads right down there, and it’s the people who live upstairs who get to go around to the side of the house to do laundry.
There’s a space for my car in the back, plus a big back area with a garden that’s right off our kitchen. The front has a nice porch, which is much better than my front porch at my current duplex because it’s not on a busy street. The back area means grilling and parties when it’s nice, the huge dining room that opens up to the living room via pocket doors means parties inside when it’s not nice out. I can host Thanksgiving for once! I think this is going to be an excellent apartment. The one thing it doesn’t have that we wanted, but wasn’t a dealbreaker? A dishwasher. But it has probably two to three times as much storage in the kitchen as I have now, so I think I can live without it.
All in all, I’m very happy, and I’m sitting on my phone to make sure I don’t miss the landlord’s call. My rent will go down since Hanne and I are splitting it equally, and a fireplace means that (gas) heating bills in the winter will drastically go down even if other utilities will go up since it’s a bigger space.
Hanne and I both went for a run yesterday around the waterfront bridges (Hawthorne to Steel and back), and as celebration for finding what we consider to be our perfect apartment, we canceled out our 4 mile run with a calorific dinner at Vincente’s Pizza. No worries, though–I’m running again tomorrow.
If all goes well, we move this weekend. Assuming we ever get “the call.” Of course, since we pretty much handed her a sizable chunk of money, we also considered that it could all be a scam, but she had keys, she knew the place, and she had a book of pictures from when she used to live there, so I’m going out on a limb and saying it probably wasn’t a scam.
I can’t wait to move.
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