Aw, dang. When I saw the thread title, I thought maybe the thread was about how you guys lived in a yurt. Or a teepee. Possibly even an igloo.
To me, an apartment IS a house. As in, “come on over to my house.”
I’d have a house with a garden. A flat with a private garden would be ok except that you often get hit by stupidly high maintenance fees in the UK.
Maybe it’s different when the day-to-day weather is predictable. I’ve brought my daughter up entirely in gardenless flats with lots of beautiful parks very nearby plus shared outside space, but it’s just not the same as having your own garden.
To go outside to play, we both had to get fully dressed, take umbrellas and/or sunscreen and toys, and then the weather might have turned. Or it might change in the one minute walk to the park. Whereas if we’d had a garden we could have put out a paddling pool and dashed out to play in it as soon as the sun broke through the clouds.
We could have our morning coffee in our pyjamas in the garden! Granted, round here you could get away with that in the park too but I don’t want to be one of those people.
We have window boxes and we put more time and effort into them than some people do their gardens. Our cat sits looking out wistfully and making strange sounds at the birds. We had to rehome our dog and I am extremely sad about it.
I quite literally dream of having a garden every few nights and wake up missing it.
[RIGHT]Location: “Hicksville,” northern Arkansas[/RIGHT]
I know it’s just your signature, but now you’ve got me trying to come up with scenarios where I would ask my lawyer whether to get a house or apartment.
Personally, I’ve never lived in an apartment and don’t really have a desire to change my ways at this point. I have no desire to live in a bigger city or anything like that. A lot of people say there is nothing to do here, but I like that a lot more than the bustle I’ve perceived whenever I’ve visited a city. Around here, an apartment is most likely either a separate building or, at worst, a second floor of a two floor house. The cost also isn’t that much different–if you want to save money, you move into someone else’s house.
Not for me. I’ve lived in apartments (hated it), townhouses (disliked it), suburban houses (better than apartments, but still not my thing). I do ‘get’ the advantages of apartment living, it just isn’t for me.
I now, after many years of pursuing the goal, have my ideal living condition: a log cabin on 60 acres, mostly bushland. I can’t see my neighbours, but there is a friendly yet independent minded community here. I have found I need space around me. and trees, lots of trees. Here, I can breathe.
My ideal living quarters in this order are:
Boat
RV
Apartment or Condo
House
Tent
I think I’d like living in a mobile house like a boat or RV. It would make me feel more connected to the world and save me money. The problem is temperature regulation, the temps can vary 100F between summer and winter. And that would be pretty uncomfortable.
Failing that, I don’t want tons of upkeep so I would want an apartment or condo.
I planted several trees – a palm and two pines – at the house I grew up in. It’s been nice watching them grow, and every so often I check them in Google Earth. But there’s no public transit there, not even a bus line, and everything you need is two or three miles away at least. I’ll take the option of being able to walk to places every time.
If I felt such an enormous urge to do either, I could just drop by the land of my farmer friends, or by the allotments of those who have one. And if I got the urge terribly, terribly often, I could apply for an allotment. From my flat to the allotments at the old mill it’s a ten minute walk if you stop to chitchat. And, being a small place, nobody blinks if you’re “dressed for the allotment” in your worst clothing.
I don’t make much money and I hate the idea of being stuck in one dwelling for years, or life, with the responsibility of all maintenance and every little repair hanging over my head. Even more horrifying is the constantly fluctuating housing market, and ending up with a property you can’t get out of without selling it for less than you paid for it. I can’t understand why people view buying a home as an investment; it’s a steady drain on resources for thirty years before it’s yours, and few people stick it out that long; most buy and sell multiple homes throughout adulthood.
Pretty sure I’ll rent for life, unless I end up wealthy enough to buy and flip multiple properties (and by ‘end up’, I mean ‘marry someone who makes lots of money’, cause I am never going to).
For those of you who prefer apartment living: Do you like sharing walls/floors/ceilings with others, or is it something you put up with because you like all other aspects of apartment living? Or is it something you don’t even notice?
Do you like living in a “community” setting or is it something you deal with? Or do you not really notice?
My parents, God bless 'em, are constantly making repairs on their house. They bought it new just a little over a decade ago, but it seems to me it’s a piece of crap since every year my father is stressing over some unexpected expenditure.
I just don’t have it in me to care about HVAC systems and cracked foundations and termites and leaky pipes and all varieties of whatnot. Not to mention the cosmetic stuff that your neighbors will sweat you about. I don’t like thinking about these things. When the weekend comes, I just want to relax and not worry about being scammed by yet another contractor.
The only 2 problems I had when I moved into my first apartment were:
On my first weekend there, there was a blizzard. My roomie got stuck at her BF’s house [I am certain she didn’t try that hard to get home from there :p] and I spent most of saturday at RIT watching movies at the student union, ending up watching The Shining. A friend and I braved the storm in a lull and made it home [we both lived in the same apartment complex] and I spent the first night there alone in a totally dark apartment [the power had gone out] and it was terrifying. I kept hearing sounds like someone was walking around in the place.:eek: It was very obvious in retrospect that it was the other tenants walking around in their apartments:rolleyes:
The second issue was the jackass in the parking spot assigned next to mine. She had a habit of slamming her car door into my car. I solved that one once when she opened her door into my car while I was sitting in my car. She drove an Aries [where the body panels are more or less very light sheet metal] and I drove a 74 mustang. I slammed my door open hard enough to crease her door panel and stared her down. She never opened her car door into my car after that. <evil smiley>
Really, other than cooking smells in the shared hallway, and occasionally hearing the neighbors, I never had an issue with apartment/hive living. Now dorms on the other hand where you can end up with some random stranger sharing a single room with you, that can be a bitch. Nothing like coming back to find someone they invited into the shared room decided to rummage through your stuff …
In my own case: I put up with it because I like the other aspects.
Actually, now I live in a townhouse, so I only share two walls with others. Nobody underneath me or above me, I have my own garage a small backyard. For me this is the perfect compromise.
I’d like to live in a (small) house, but I know nothing about basic repairs (or anything DIY, really), so if anything broke down I’d be pretty SOL.
So I guess my ideal living situation would be a very well-soundproofed apartment.
This depends entirely on the neighbors, and on the quality of construction of the building.
Currently I share a small two bedroom apartment, the middle floor of a three story house. It’s an older house and well-insulated, and when in my home I almost never hear a noise from upstairs neighbors (college students) or downstairs (couple with two children in elementary school), even though they play music and socialize frequently (as I hear and see in my hallway or passing open windows out front). They are also courteous neighbors and never make excessive noise, and sleep at night. I couldn’t be happier.
My bedroom window opens on a courtyard backed by 5 or 6 houses. Except the occasional Friday night party, it’s quiet out there too. My whole neighborhood is quiet, clean, and full of responsible working people. I chose it for that reason. 
I live in inner city Philadelphia; there are lots of EXTREMELY loud, bad neighborhoods full of crazy people and murder.
I like the housing situation that I currently have, a generously-sized single family home on a little less than an acre, although my ideal would be 5 acres where I could walk outside and not see neighbors at all.
I don’t do yard work/gardening and haven’t for many years; I pay a landscaping/lawn service for that.
I could never again live in an apartment. Been there, done that in my 20s when I had no money. The idea of partitioned living gives me the heebee-jeebees.
I find arguments that homeowners have a much higher personal burden when it comes to dwelling repairs than renters to be spurious or misinformed. I don’t perform any more repairs than I ever did when I was renting, which is zero. I do whatever anyone else does who needs something fixed …I call someone.
You actually can rent a small house, back when I was living in Norfolk VA, I had a nice spot in a white slum neighborhood. When I say nice, I mean that the place was the back half of a single level duplex that was purpose built as a duplex. Cinderblock, under several seriously huge old growth pines so it got shade year around, 6 foot privacy fence on 3 sides, and it was behind a single family ‘cottage’ [one bedroom, also cinderblock] and normally very quiet. We did have a house of bikers [Pagans] kitty corner across the street who occasionally had loud parties and shot out the transformer more than once [or a guest at one of their parties] but otherwise were pretty decent neighbors. The front house rented for $450 and utilities in 1986 [I was paying $350 for the back 1 bedroom, and the other half of the duplex rented for the same] And a previous boyfriend in Rochester and I looked at a 3 bedroom oddity house [it was upside down, the bedrooms and bath were on the ground floor, the all in one kitchen, dining and living room were on the second floor, with an amazing 2 part deck, one part of which was a gazebo at the end of a bridge/walkway and was cantelivered over the dune at the edge of Lake Ontario. We had been renting a 3 bed/2 bath further west on the lakeshore. Both properties rented for about $750-800 in 1982.
Really, if you want to, you can rent single family houses. Though to be honest, I would own a duplex and use a rental agency to manage the other unit and have them keep your ownership a secret.
[one duplex I rented was 8405 Atlantic Ave, Va Beach - when I rented it, it was houses across the street on the land side, I see in google maps it is now a condo building. The other place I rented was in the slums of 13th Bay St, Norfolk. Looking at the map, it is still there. If you pull up a map of 13th Bay St, Norfolk VA there is a cluster of 4 buildings tucked behind a small strip plaza with Chanellos - the lower left corner structure - a flat white rectangle is the duplex I had. If you notice a brick apartment building backing it up on 12th Bay, that is where a guy in the Navy dismembered his wife, stashed the body in the bathtub and left her there for a month. He kept using the neighbor’s bathrooms because his was ‘having plumbing troubles’:eek:]
Historians of the US landscape and built environment have written good, readable books about how the culture and geography have led to detached-homeownership being the assumed ideal, codified in government policies since the GI Bill but with precedents in the late 19th C. I’m thinking of scholars like Kenneth Jackson and Dolores Hayden.
In my post about the historical reasons for the cultural bias Skald feels himself running counter to, I gave a link to Kenneth Jackson’s book Crabgrass Frontier. Here’s part of a helpful Anazkn customer review of the book:
"The author does an excellent job of explaning the cultural and technological conditions that existed in the 19th century which made the move the the perifery seem attractive and, above all, logical. Today, in the 21st century, we have a difficult time placing oursleves in the shoes of the aspiring 19th century home-owner. We get stuck on the question “How could they just leave their cities to rot?” This book takes us back to show us the ideals, hopes and dreams of the 19th cenury burghers – which the author also expertly contrasts to 19th-century realities. In this way, Jackson shows us how the move to a tract-house on a winding lane named after a tree could only seem like the conquest of the new-world utopia to the train-hopping clerks who first embraced suburbia.
The brightest examples of these cultural trends are the author’s description of the rising symbolic importance of the garden, as well as his emphasis on the media-images associated with the new “old” country gentry. Overall, he describes an America (ironically) in search of its “country” roots, while in the midst of the greatest urban/industrial boom the world has ever known. By placing the reader firmly in a world where the word “cab” connoted a horse and carriage and where “pollution” meant horse-dung, Jackson makes us aware that the suburbs arose out of a legitimate desire to improve living standards in a very real way."