the old apartment

Today is the last day that Dena and I will be renters. As of this morning, we’ll be home owners, and should be totally moved into our house by day’s end tomorrow.

Since the age of 18, I’ve lived in dorms, a student townhouse and our current apartment. Will I miss our apartment which is where we’ve been for the past 5+ years? Hell no, and here’s why:

• Waiting on a landlord to fix anything sucks. We’ve gone a combined total of 16 days without hot water, requiring a total of two replacement hot water heaters. Apparently showering and doing dishes isn’t all that important in the eye’s of TransGlobe.
• Mould. Our building’s air ducts are covered in the stuff. It finds its way to our outside walls. Thank goodness for Lysol wipes.
• The gag-inducing aromatic combination of dirty socks, urinal cakes, weed, baby shit and ashtray in the building’s halls is something you’d think you get used to. But you don’t.
• Parking lots suck. I will enjoy our new driveway and garage in that I’ll never have to fight for a parking spot again. And don’t get me started on waking up to find weird “spills” on our car and beer bottles next to our tires.
• Sharing walls means that we share more than that. When the people across the hall have a party, we hear it clear as a bell…and it sounds like the party is in their bathroom. A couple of years ago, a woman and her son (maybe 10 years old) lived in the apartment directly below ours. Dena and I really didn’t need alarm clocks, because every morning at around 6:30AM, they’d be screaming at the tops of their lungs at each other. What they were actually saying to each other was undecipherable, but neither were obviously pleased with the other….every day! When we passed them in the stairwell, they both had a look of “help me” on their faces. Weird.
• Communal laundry rooms are gross. You’d think that the rinse cycle would wash away any nastiness that other tenants manage to get on their clothes, but this isn’t always the case and it’s often stuck to the bottom of the washer. I also won’t miss having to horde loonies and quarters in order to do laundry.
• The other tenants…wow! I must admit, our apartment isn’t fancy downtown loft or condo. When I found it, I was 23 years-old with $75 in my chequing account and had just moved to Kitchener to start my first job out of university. It’s depressing to think that it became “home” for the past 5+ years. In that time, we managed to get to know nobody else in the building. Most people are completely unfriendly. There is a guy on our floor that Dena and I know only as “Moosehead”; we still don’t know his name. We christened him “Moosehead” when we first noticed that he always had a two-four of Moosehead under his arm every time we saw him. He’s become cost-conscious lately, as we now regularly see him with cases of Bohemian, Lakeport and Lucky instead. He, however, is the only person in those 5+ years that’s friendly and says “hi” to us.

Dena and I are totally looking forward to home ownership.