The other day, I looked out the window to check for packages and noticed this nightmare insect chilling on the screen.
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Praying Mantis |
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"Psst, hey. You're dead." |
Fred is doing well, and we're about to start toilet-training him. His new flushable cat litter is made from wheat, so we can also make bread while we're training him.
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Fred, meanwhile, has been containing himself well. |
The apartment. These past two weeks we've lived here have crawled by, and the next two days are going to crawl even longer. We plan on renting a car and hitting up the nearby Ikea and Home Depot in one fell (fell means expensive, right?) swoop for our fixing-up supplies. This includes housepaint and lumber for shelves.
Things that suck in an old house: Besides the good chance that it's haunted, the plumbing always sucks. The outlets are 2-pronged and spaced 80 feet apart. Same with studs.
Like any girl, I was thrilled to receive my new magnetic stud finder in the mail. I scanned through three entire rooms and didn't find a single one. That means I'm crap out of luck, and when it comes to installing things like my pots and pans pegboard, I'm going to have to use mountain climbing gear to get it to stay up in the drywall.
Below is a pictoral saga of everything that's wrong in the apartment, and in some cases, how we've overcome them.
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We had a hefty power strip with a long enough cord to wind around the wall from the outlet to beneath Tim's desk. |
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This radiator. These walls. What degree of angle is this? Why is there an outlet there? Fortunately we plan on putting the microwave and other small dining appliances on a shelf there, where it'll fit perfectly and we'll be able to make use of that outlet. |
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Today Fred has been my little hardware helper. He played with the bags I was organizing, he helped me wedge pencils under the fridge, and he helped jump in the boxes I was trying to tape up. Here he is gnawing and killing a small strip of cardboard. Don't spend money on cat toys, is the lesson here. |
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Like my mother, I am a mug aficionado. This is moronic, as I don't even drink coffee. These already-here hooks and shelf are helpful in that they save cupboard space, but unhelpful in that I have to choose which mugs I'm going to use forever. |
This is our kitchen.
It's small and horrible, and I say that not only because it obviously is, but because it's an immense downgrade from our previous kitchen, appliance-wise, space-wise, and accessibility-wise. Our old kitchen can best be described as "boss," and I miss it sorely. I love to cook, and I have a lot of utensils and gadgets to facilitate that. I don't mess around. The fact that I need to buy WD-40 to open the oven door is a major bummer.
I'd also like to point out that I did not use a garbage disposal until my first apartment as a sophomore in college. At the time, it was filled with the previous tenant's rice and was broken. I consider garbage disposals "fancy" and "for rich assholes." That being said, having one was really convenient and awesome, and saved a lot of veggie-prep time. I would definitely opt for one if I had the choice.
This kitchen does not come with a microwave. That's where I draw the line. I don't eat microwave meals, but I don't wait 40 minutes to heat leftovers in the oven either. Especially with this oven, which can be carbon-dated for the most part. And I cook toast in the oven. I have never owned a toaster of my own. I would probably never stop eating PopTarts if I did.
We have Tim's microwave from college, which has spent 6 or 7 years collecting spiders on his parents' porch. Needless to say, we sprang for a $40 microwave from WalMart, which was made this decade and doesn't require Herculean strength just to pry the damn door open.
Here we come to Glaring Problem Number One: Kitchen Outlets. Where are they, you may be wondering? I'll show you, through the magic of photography.
Here, at eye level on this wall:
And here above the sink (which is watery in case you forgot), out of reach of any nearby counter space.
Helping add to counter space is this portable dishwasher, which we bought off of the previous tenant and have run a few times so far. It's fine, but when it runs it sounds like it's evoking the rage of Poseidon. It's got wheels, but so do Wal-Mart shopping carts, and those suck too. I am grateful for the added dishwasher, counter space, and portability however.
I mentioned earlier that I forgot to take some before-and-after pictures of cleaning the kitchen and bathroom. The other night I was playing on the kitchen floor with Fred when I glanced up and emitted a Hank Hill-esque yell of horror. Here, below the kitchen cabinet, is a yummy peek into the kind of work we had cut out for us.
Now on to some improvements I've made thus far:
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Bought and installed a little inner-cabinet caddy for foil and wrap. Our old apartment's kitchen had AWESOME storage, and I kept this stuff in one of the drawers that was shallow in height but deep in the counter. It was perfect. |
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These pots and pans are going to be hung up on a pegboard on the wall, but in the back is a simple box shelf I made out of a moving box, because I'm tired of spending money on wire storage. I'm hoping it will help keep things organized in the giant open space under the sink. Considering the amount of mouse turd I cleaned from under there, I'm reluctant to leave our cooking supplies exposed and jumbled down there. |
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Another storage box, using the open slot to our advantage in terms of being able to grab sandwich and trash bags. It also has our frequently-used cleaning spray and cat litter bags. |
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Yum. |
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The stove hood. Also yum. |
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What's this random metal flap doing on the wall next to the door, you ask? |
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Why, it's a portal to Disgusting! And don't worry, because it doesn't stay closed and the turny knob doesn't turn and lock it! Lol! |
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We hope to repair the cracks in the walls like this when we repaint. Apparently this paint was frosted on. |
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This picture is blurry, but I'm here to tell you that this is ketchup or some other form of dried condiment. This is above the doorway's molding in the kitchen. This is 9 feet high. My camera even recognized the stain and focused in on it with a little red square. |
Off of the kitchen is a small little pantry-hallway thingy. Fortunately, the door sticks on the ground, but the real kicker is inside the pantry.
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I am waiting for an over-the-door pantry shelf to arrive in the mail, and then I can put most of our dried food items on it and save some much-needed space. |
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This screenshot from the show "Hoarders" exemplifies the sad state of the pantry/linen closet/suicide hotspot. Each shelf seems to have been bought and installed separately, by a 4th grader who failed basic math. Each shelf is a different length, height, and width, so you never know what's going to fit! The interior of the closet is also triangularly-shaped, which means that the door won't close if something's placed on the edge of the shelf (like where the sewing basket is, for instance). |
Next is the bathroom. The bathroom, the bathroom.
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Our window looks directly into the kitchen/dining room of the neighbor. |
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The showerhead is too small and feeble to house our shower caddy, but this trusty Random Screw has saved the day! Problem solved! |
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This built-in soap dish, which used to be orange, touches my butt. |
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That's right, that's not an illusion. The showerhead is zip-tied to the curtain rail.
One of the first things Tim did when we started to clean was remove this showerhead and run it under scalding water. We have an awesome showerhead from a previous apartment, but naturally the threadings don't match up. We hope to remedy that this weekend. |
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Moving down the shower pipe. This looks like tightly-wound plastic bag, but what do I know? |
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The knobs, way at the bottom of the tub. This means that, if you are showering and you don't want to get your hair wet, you get to lean directly into the shower water to turn it off. It also means that, if the water is Inferno-hot, which it is naturally, you get to lean directly into the shower water to turn it off. |
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Whoever invented this dirt-and-pube-catching concept can go directly to hell. These are attached to the floor tub, and were brown when we moved in. |
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At least there's ample storage space under the sink, right? |
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Wrong. Hot, rusty, melty pipes instead! |
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These tiles in the bathroom are over a hundred years old. I believe it. |
And finally, the bathroom's coup de grace: the desk lamp wedged onto the top of the mirror.
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The switch to turn it on. |
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HouseBeautiful called. |
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This depressing little fixture bathes the bathroom in sad, yellow light at night. The quiet hum of the vent is similar to that of a light plane's propellor. |
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Fred doesn't care about privacy: he poops in a box. |
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This right here is the carbon monoxide detector, at knee-height in the pantry area. At least it works.
There are two empty smoke alarm holders in the ceiling of our apartment, and apparently I didn't get that it was a BYO smoke alarm. It's also, we learned, under the "Cheap Bastards" clause of New Jersey rentals, not the responsibility of the landlord to provide a fire extinguisher, as it is in Massachusetts. |
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The bedroom. Still a mess from unpacking. |
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There are 2 doors leading to the bedroom. This one sticks, as you can see by the aged furrows in the wood. |
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This paint-and-spackle job reminds me of Mission Hill apartments. |
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A gimp-in closet. The sloped ceiling really plays into my terror of small spaces. |
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This cute exposed bulb fixture in the closet helps us feel like we're in a Nine Inch Nails video as we're dressing. |
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Every doorknob in the apartment was fashioned by Geppetto of Pinocchio fame. |
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This was another major problem: A radiator with some kind of homemade shelf thing over it. In terms of configuring the bed and side tables, this threw that notion completely out the window. |
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A nice fly corpse collecting light |
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Ethernet boxes like this make it impossible to push furniture flush against the wall. |
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This is the front door. In Boston, one would immediately think, "This apartment has been broken into before." But I guess this is just door maintenance? (Believe me, we asked). |
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This dirty lightswitch next to the door makes an alarming electrical buzz for the first five minutes it's on. Or rather, switched "off" (even the switch positioning's wrong). |
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A closeup of what is keeping murderers from entering our home. |
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The living room. I love it. It's spacious and bright. It's going to look great once the walls are painted, things are unpacked, and everything's arranged. |
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Same with this room, which we were able to combine into a dining and office area. My new desk is awesome. |
I will be posting more pictures once the rooms are repainted, which will be happening next week, and I can't wait to finally organize everything and feel less cluttered.
We are really determined to make this apartment work, since the location is phenomenal: close to NYC train, restaurants, grocery store. And it's a very safe area. Our upstairs neighbors and nice and welcoming and they even like Zelda too! This has been a real challenge so far, but I love a good home improvement project as much as the next gal.
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