The Living Room

Wordle: living room

Monday, October 15, 2007

Out of innocent curiosity

I looked at an apartment this week. I don' t have the money to move in, and now I'm trying to score a second job as well to pay for things (the first job, though awesome and with lots of room for expantion, is only on the weekends for now).

I called around to a few estate companies that have upwards of twenty buildings each. One I called had nothing available, and the next one had 18 buildings and two apartments for rent. This is the hallway into the one I looked at:



That's the apartment door, over on the left. I should have taken a picture of the bolts on the other side of the door. There were 3. One of those hotel slider-types, and two deadbolts. Beefy door security.
This is the kitchen:

Here you can see one of the two windows in the whole thing. The other one is smaller. (It's a basement studio apartment. The cheapest thing this neighborhood had to offer).




Most of the rooms had some nice built-ins, but that's about the most positive thing I can say at the moment.

<--This here is the bedroom, a shot taken from the door, as far away as I could get and still get a reasonable amount of the room in the picture. My backpack and sweater are on the floor, but they're not making the dimensions exceptionally easy to gauge. I figure the room was about 11X12, it had room for a fold-up Murphy bed (not that I have a Murphy bed, or any real desire to have to own a Murphy bed...), and that darkish square in the left of the frame about 1/2way up the wall is the room's heater. I don't think there was such a thing in the bathroom, but there might have been one in the kitchen. Closet space was a coat closet that warred with the front door if you tried to open it, and two shallow linen closets, one on either side of the Murphy bed cut out.

The bathroom should show you how clean, modern, and useable the whole thing seemed to be.


The reason I couldn't get the door open more was the ridiculously cracked and (poorly) re-enamled iron clawed tub. Looks like there's a little heating unit to the left of that toilet (the newest looking thing in the house). I guess I was wrong about the heat. This room had an astounding number of built-ins, and the other window. Not that my main living space needs a window anyway.

Just for fun, here's what I discovered right across the hall from the studio:


Hooray! A terrifying boiler room! Where, apparently, everyone in the building also parks their bikes.

I always dreamed of living right across from where the creepy mainainance guy sleeps on his straw cot with his cheap wine and porno-postcards!

Now, I'll let you guys know how much they wanted for about 300 square feet of Portland next time. Any guesses?




By the way, I looked at this just out of curiosity, but someone was definitely coming down to sign papers to take it before I left the renter's office.





1 comment:

molls said...

wowza. that looks like quite the find. not much space for culinary creations in that fantastic-looking kitchen, either.

I have no guesses...I've never investigated apartment costs. Will you give me the answer anyway? :D