Listening to the deafening grind of our blender while it worked hard to make my husband’s smoothie at 8:30pm, I cringed. The pillows around my ears couldn’t drown out the noise. It was surely tumbling up the stairs and pounding on the door of my sleeping son’s room. It hit me. The hands down absolute worst part of our residency experience is and forever will be summed up in 1,000 square feet.
Sure, apartment living has its perks. We don’t have to clean the pool in our front yard, and we have some really great neighbors only a few buildings over. The front of “our property” is adorned by a sparkling, flowing fountain. We have a dedicated security guard keeping watch over our countless amenities, most of which have safety locks, only a few of which are missing bars in their fences, and almost none of which require too much TLC from management to keep looking mediocre. No Fitbit is a match for the amount of steps it takes to get from our parking space to our front door. Or our mail box. Between that and the stretches I’ve invented to gain access to the weirdly creative storage spaces, I’ve never been more in shape.
But can we talk about that storage for a minute? Under our stairs we have a HUGE empty space–carpeted and so far uninhabited by tiny critters–affectionately called the “tiny basement” by the neighborhood kids. The problem is, it’s about 400 times deeper than it is wide (not unlike our “pantry” cabinets, which could probably hold at least six cans of beans if you stored them single file, one in front of the other). This “tiny basement” was probably meant to hold holiday decorations and other rarely used household objects. In reality, we’ve stuffed several complex shelving systems inside the closet, with high hopes that we can make this space an extension of our kitchen storage. Whoever designed our kitchen must not have owned more than a few plates and a starter set of utensils. I keep my pots and pans in the tiny basement. I plan to start cooking again when my toddler is old enough to follow basic commands, such as “go fetch the skillet, mommy’s too tall to reach it.”
Anybody else have a washer and dryer outside their house? I have to wait to do my laundry until Cannon is asleep, otherwise I end up sacrificing my sanity and half my body’s hydration to the combined sadistic will of the gods of humidity and heat.
We do have 2.5 bathrooms, though. Gotta love cleaning three toilets that don’t flush properly. But at least we have a spare tub while we wait for management to fix the faucet on our first one. I hope they don’t mind Cannon’s artwork on the tub when they come. Goodbye, security deposit.
But hey, I planted a vegetable garden in the 1 inch x 4 inch plot of dirt outside my front door. I live in constant fear that I’ll wake up and find the plants have been pulled by the landscapers, but as for today, there is the budding promise of jalapeños in my future. What could be better than that?
