New Apartment Sweet New Apartment

If you've been reading since the beginning, the ACN people didn't have my real apartment ready, so they had me living in a temporary apartment for about a month. Last weekend, in the midst of grading papers, they said I could move into my new place. Here's a picture to show how far I moved up the street.

This place is infinitely quieter than the last place, since you can see the construction scaffolding all around the outside. At 7:00 every morning, a man with a 50-pound sledge hammer woke me up by pounding above my head as I slept in my bedroom.

This is my half of the building, which is another renovated apartment building that used to house workers at the nearby paper mill that just closed down (they've actually started disassembling the old smoke stacks at the plant, which makes it harder for drunk students to find their way back to the dorms, I'm told). You can see in the picture that I even have a front yard and a shade tree! Finally. I can yell at adolescent miscreants to get off my lawn. This building is actually a duplex, more or less. I have the north side of the building, and two ACN students live in the southern half.

As we get inside, it's a straight shot into the living room through the kitchen. The place is still a mess, as I'm trying to figure out where I can put all the smaller kitchen appliances. On the ride side, you can see some counter space and a few drawers, so I've been trying to cram as much stuff over there as possible.

As for the rest of the kitchen, there isn't much space over here to put pots, pans, food, and other kitchen stuff. The two cupboards above the sink are full of dishes. The cupboard above the stove, however, a good majority of the space is filled with the vent from the stove's exhaust fan, so this cupboard serves as my pantry; it's a lot easier to pile smaller pantry items into this cupboard than try to put a bunch of plates and cooking utensils here. The magnetic hold on the fridge door is incredible. You can't open the fridge without making the whole fridge move. Norwegian engineering at its finest!

If you go back a few steps into the entryway and take a left, you'll end up in the bathroom. It's actually a really big bathroom, so I'm wondering if that's a Norwegian thing, as my last apartment had a huge bathroom, as well. I wonder if it has to be big to accommodate a toilet, a sink, a water heater, a washing machine, and a shower (a shower that doesn't leak, I might add). I took my first real shower since August, and I just stood there under the shower head for about ten minutes, loving the fact that I wasn't flooding my bathroom by enjoying the hot water. The water pressure is ridiculously strong, too. The shower has a removable shower head/hand sprayer thing, so if you put the shower head into its little cradle and angle it just right, the water pressure will move the entire shower head.

 Another cool this about this bathroom is the fact that I've got what appears to be a brand new washing machine. This one is a little different from the washing machine in the other apartment, since that other one was a combination washer and dryer. This is only the washing machine portion, but I finally found a clothes drying rack when I moved apartments.

Below is the living room. It was kind of a challenge getting all (okay, most) of the furniture from the old apartment to the new one. This place is a little smaller than the previous place, but it feels a lot more cozy, I guess. That, and sweaty workmen don't wake me up every morning with a percussive alarm clock. If you saw on Facebook the other day, I said that I got a TV in my new place, and I was trying to watch Norwegian-dubbed Hannah Montana. I've got a big bookshelf where I can keep my thesis research organized, and I even have a desk to work on my thesis at home, so those two things make life a little easier 

Here we have the "Steps of Doom" just inside and to the left of the entry into the living room. Each stair up to the bedroom is cut into a wedge-shape, as you can see, so there's no real way to rush up and down the steps if I'm late in the morning for class. It also makes things difficult since you can only start walking up the stairs with your left foot first; if you forget and use your right foot first, the climb is that much more perilous.

Just to show you how steep these stairs are, here's a shot looking downward toward the living room. The transition between the last step and the bedroom floor always feels awkward, since there isn't a landing at the top of the steps. The living room has open rafters, which I really like; it makes the space feel so much more open, but at the same time, I can turn on a single lamp in the living room and provide adequate light to the living room and the upstairs bedroom. 

Finally: the master suite. It's a little room, but I'm sure it was made only for sleeping, as any other activity could be done with ease downstairs in the living room. From the previous apartment, the only things I figured would fit up here would be the four-drawer dresser to the right and the two-drawer end-table/nightstand. I put a single lamp up here and angled it up at the ceiling, as the light reflecting off the white paint makes the light a little less harsh and bright. I do have a few pictures that I'd like to hang, but I'm not sure where to put them just yet. Again, the place is a little disheveled, but I only started unpacking yesterday. Welcome to Casa de Kirb! Oh, wait, wrong language.