Moving Part III: At the Sign of the Bloodstone

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Joe We've been here a few weeks now, so I guess we're as settled in as we're going to get. High time to get around to describing our new digs.

This apartment is definitely larger, about 20% larger actually, but naturally we've expanded to fill the space in the few short weeks we've been here. The most welcome space is in the kitchen. Those of you who have seen any of our previous kitchens will no doubt recognize that I'm not saying much when I state that this is the largest kitchen we've had in our life together, but I'll take it a step further and say that this is the first time we've been able to work in the kitchen side by side. It also has a space for a table, with a roughly south facing window and door opening out onto our small balkong, great for growing a few kitchen window herbs.



Having the table out of the living room adds a lot of space to that room as well, despite it actually being pretty much exactly the same size as the last. The living room also has a larger window, which is nice, and we've made a pretty cozy sitting area clustered around the brighter half of the room. The window is also the room's drawback: we're on the first floor now, and the entrance to the building can only be reached by walking right past our window, which oddly lacks blinds. Our first week we spent a lot of time accidentally meeting the glances of all our neighbors as they walked past our couch, but eventually I got the curtains finished, and with the judicious application of some translucent window film along the lower edge of the window we now have a reasonable amount of privacy with no appreciable loss of light.

It's a little thing, I know, but my favorite part of the living room is the door leading to the hallway. In a more modern apartment it would probably just be an empty archway, but this building dates from the mid-sixties, so instead we have a door-and-a-half, both with a glass panel for the upper two thirds of the door. It serves no real purpose—the only reason I can think that we would close the door would be to use the front room as a guest room, and in that case the glass panels are less than optimal—but it adds a little charm to the place.

The winner in the charm category has to be the hallway light fixture, though. Groovy, man.

There is quite a bit more closet space here, although it's oddly broken up into a series of cabinets, some in the smaller bedroom (which we've moved into, for that very reason) but mostly in the hallway. A lot of the cabinets have strange wooden drawers or oddly shaped dividers built in, so we're still trying to figure out where to put everything.

Speaking of storage, with the new place we've also acquired some basement space. There's a bicycle/pram storage room which may be handy if the snow starts. Every apartment in the building also comes with its own little storage area, complete with chicken wire dividers and gates. Ours is bizarrely located in a dim little corridor hidden behind this serious looking doorway. I would like to think it's an old bomb shelter—the building is from the 60s, recall—but then why does it only seal from the outside?