The latest chapter in the saga of the Whatsit family has us, yes, moving. No longer will we be crammed into a little one-bedroom shack in the heart of Seattle’s seamy U-District.[sup]*[/sup] No, we’re movin’ on up! To the north side! Where we’ll finally have a piece of the pie!
Or at least some extra storage space, and hey, I’m not one to quibble.
When I say we currently live in a “shack”, I am exaggerating but slightly. We have “hardwood” floors that are actually more like softwood floors, in that they are splintering and falling apart. This is not so safe for the newly mobile Whatsit Jr. Another exciting feature of this place is that you have to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom, and our queen-sized bed plus Whatsit Jr.'s crib takes up pretty much the entire width of the bedroom, so to get to the bathroom, you have to wedge yourself around a corner of the bed. And, the only closet in the entire house is in the bedroom and is now currently blocked by the crib. So we have no closet space. There’s piles of stuff sitting around all over the place, because we have nowhere to put it.
Then there’s the plumbing. This house was built sometime in the 1920s, and MrWhatsit and I think the plumbing may well have been an afterthought. The kitchen sink’s tap is reversed, so you have to turn it to the right for hot and the left for cold, opposite from most sinks. Of course, this is sort of irrelevant, as the cold water side of the tap has not worked for several months now. If you want cold water from the kitchen tap, your best bet is to make sure it’s been a few hours since anyone used the water in the kitchen, then turn on the “hot” water. Since it will undoubtedly be at least three minutes until the water stops being Arctic-fresh, you can get your cold water that way. However, once the hot water does come on, you only have a short period of time before it heats up to “flesh-charringly hot”. Make use of your kitchen tap heating window, that’s our motto around here.
I won’t even mention the fact that the kitchen faucet is constantly dripping no matter what we do, or that the toilet is continually running. Minor tidbits in the grand scheme of things, really.
I will mention that we have an old-fashioned clawfoot porcelain tub in the bathroom. Sounds great, you say? Try taking a shower in one. You need three shower curtains to wrap around the length of the tub, and one is bound to gap open at the worst possible moment. Also, whoever designed the plumbing in the house bizarrely decided to place TWO showerheads in the tub, directly overhead. Because they are directly overhead, you can’t hang those handy shower caddies on them, so we have to put our shampoo and soap on the floor of the tub, where it gets kicked over, stepped on, and in the case of the soap, melted into nothing. Did I mention that one of the showerheads has no pressure, so when the working showerhead is going like gangbusters with nice hot water blasting out, you step into the tub and suddenly feel icy fingers caressing your back as water drips onto you from the broken showerhead? Consider it mentioned.
Then there’s the heat. The heat for the entire house comes from a gas stove parked in the middle of the living room. The most alarming “feature” of this stove is that when it heats up, the sides and front of it become blisteringly hot. Did I mention that Whatsit Jr. is newly mobile these days? I’m just thankful that for the last two months of winter, the stove failed to work entirely, and we had the pleasure of heating our entire house with electric space heaters. Seattle City Light was thankful, too.
There is a plethora of other small details that I will not delve into fully at this time, such as the lack of bedroom doors, nonfunctional dryer, and broken dishwasher.
The point (“she has one?” shut up.) is, we’re moving! Finally! Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at last! MrWhatsit and I put down a deposit last week on a lovely new apartment in a charming complex that has a swimming pool, among other niceties. There’s a fireplace, all new appliances, including a dishwasher, lots of closet space, bedroom doors, carpeting, and all kinds of other stuff that we are presently lacking. It’s just about as big, too. I am so happy I could about faint.
Now if I can only manage to post this without the hamsters eating it for breakfast…
[sup]*[/sup][sub]OK, not so much “seamy” as “riddled with frat boys and dotted liberally with Thai restaurants and pho houses”, but you get the drift.[/sub]