Jesus, are you my long-lost sister?
I did think of something more basic than my closet in Hawaii. For a few months in Bangkok, before the wife and I could get married (she was in her 30s just like me, but her family still insisted she live with them before marriage), I lived in a guesthouse off the river, not too far from Khao San Road. I’d stayed there before when I was in town from upcountry the previous time I’d lived in Thailand. It was larger than the Hawaiian closet but not by much. Also similar was the shared bathroom down the hall and no air-con. But while in Hawaii air-con’s not really needed – the climate’s so nice that an electric fan is almost always sufficient – it gets pretty damned hot in Bangkok. And one day during Songkran, an army of ants invaded my closet. That was unpleasant. But even this place I have fond memories of and wouldn’t consider it bad. (Peachy Guesthouse, on Phra Athit Road. Still operating after all the years, but I think it’s gobe slightly more upscale. Used to be an old school, I believe.)
Tossup between the apartment I lived in, senior year of college, and the place we rented for 5 months when we first moved to DC.
The senior apartment: I shared with 2 other girls. It had all the necessities, including heat and A/C, but the walls were leaky and you could hear air whistling through the gaps around the windows. We could see daylight in one crack in the wall. So we added insulation around the door, covered the windows with plastic… and I think the cracks in the walls probably saved our lives from that foolishness - we spent 2+ months feeling EXHAUSTED ALL THE TIME. All three of us. It was years later when I stumbled across an article about carbon monoxide poisoning and realized what had probably been going on.
The place in DC: We sublet from an elderly man who was spending the winter in Florida - a perfect match, it gave us time to look for a more permanent place in a new area. It was a two-room efficiency. Bathroom was kinda cool: it had a freestanding clawfoot tub. Lots of bookshelves by the door. The kitchen stove was older than we were - had to light it with a match. The sink, similarly ancient. The electricity: well, I was shown where the fuse box was and how to change the fuses when (not IF) they blew.
The landlord was starting some renovations to rent out some unused apartments and do some infrastructure upgrades, so it might be noisy but no problem. A workman was even working on stuff in the apartment when I brought in my first carload.
I moved some stuff in, went back south for the weekend, and came up late Sunday afternoon planning to start my job the next day. Key didn’t work. Huh? I knocked on the ground-floor resident’s door and she had a new key for me - the workman had changed the apartment lock because it broke. Or did it? Turns out: he had BEEN LIVING THERE while I was gone - left the place a mess with his dirty dishes, stole a small amount of cash the regular tenant had forgotten, left cigarette butts behind, and apparently stole a lot of tools the owner had on-site.
There were two freestanding space heaters (the kind that look like little radiators). These were connected - via extension cords - to a separate electrical power supply because the regular supply wouldn’t have supported them (see fuses, above). Why space heaters? Well, the landlord was upgrading the furnace… so he’d REMOVED the old one.
This was in October. When we moved out in March, the furnace had still not been replaced. See, the owner was trying to do it on the sly, without permits, this apparently slowed the process down. We didn’t want to get our fellow thrown out, the lady on the ground floor was elderly and couldn’t have afforded better and I think was too nice and/or afraid to make waves, and the middle-floor fellow didn’t have the time to raise hell with the city… not that they’d have done much good, this being DC and all…
We were on the third floor so we weren’t all THAT cold since there were two occupied floors below us… but the lady on the ground floor, an elderly woman who had, I think, been a family housekeeper or something for the landlord, was bitterly cold. There was a basement (where the furnace went)… but THAT was open to the outdoors. She would run the stove to try to warm things up a little because she was so cold. I suggested it would be safer to fill that big bathtub with HOT water (the water heater still worked some of the time) and let that radiate out some warmth.
The dust and cockroaches were hardly worth mentioning.
Needless to say, the day we closed on our new place (out in the suburbs), we took sleeping bags and stayed there THAT VERY NIGHT.
So that was pretty unpleasant, though neither of mine hold a candle to the OP’s childhood “home”!
If I don’t look at (chosen with the location) roomies, the dorms in Heriot-Watt University. The room was tiny (the sizes mentioned in their adverts were larger), the building’s setup did not match the advertised “flats with individual bedrooms and shared kitchen, lounge and bathroom” (such existed, but my building wasn’t set up like that), the internet service was not only slow but also set up with ridiculous filters so that for example we weren’t allowed to download course-required software or play online games (I was 42, I’d think that’s old enough to decide what to do on your own time)…
Oh yes: and the roommates blew. But, unlike my recent Crazy Coworker/Flatmate, or the Indian Bimbo, they were foisted upon me by the university - and unlike in those cases, the contract with the University specifically stated that if you decided to move out, you were SOL and still had to pay rent on the tiny weeny too-expensive room.
I’m currently living in a large room that is meant to be an office on the 2nd floor of a friend’s warehouse / factory unit.
It’s not too bad as I have a sink, furniture and a/c in my room with a toilet and shower downstairs. But it’s creepy as hell - across the road is the biggest cemetery in the southern hemisphere.
On the plus side I pay no rent or utilities. Rent for an ordinary apartment in this ordinary part of Sydney can easily be $450 per week. And demand is chronically higher than supply.
My first apartment, which was just off the UT campus in Austin. $250/month, free utilities.
It was one room, with a bathroom and a small closet. No kitchen sink- I had to use the bathroom sink to wash dishes… but it was just a freestanding sink, so I had to dry the dishes on the toilet lid.
No shower curtain, rod, or door.
It had a fridge, freestanding in the main room. It also had a freestanding gas oven… with a crappy pilot light. You had to turn on the oven and then go over to the other side of the room and wait a minute or so 'til… BANG! The pilot light ignited the gas. The entire oven would jump an inch or two, because it wasn’t mounted to the floor in any way.
The closet was actually half a closet- it had just a thin layer of sheetrock at the back. The other side was the closet in my neighbor’s apartment. The sheetrock didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, so I could always hear exactly what my neighbors were saying. Oh, and no closet door, either.
No heat or air conditioning. In the winter, I had to use the oven for heat (!). In the summer, I just opened my two windows and hoped for the best. This is in Texas, of course.
Looking back, I’m kind of surprised I survived that place. I seriously doubt much of that was legal.
Wow. We rented a not-so-great place in Madison as it was one of the few places that we could find with short-term leases. (El Hubbo was graduating and had already gotten a job offer, so we knew we were moving in December.) It was a sunken, 1-bedroom, but in a pretty well-maintained apartment complex. We even had a pool! (That we used only rarely - we moved in mid-August, and were leaving by December. I think it got too cold to use pretty early on.)
It wasn’t my favorite place (that’d be either the current house or the apartment we moved to that place from), but it was clean, warm, and everything functioned as it should’ve.
I did see a hole of a place while looking for an apartment, but I didn’t take it. (The rent wasn’t really enough of a deal to put up with those conditions.) Maybe I should’ve, just for the stories!
Atlanta, GA.
When I was a teenager, my parents rented what was basically a large converted storage closet as an apartment (living room, kitchenette, bathroom) on the roof of the business my father worked for. The apartment was accessible via a fire escape 'round the back of the business. They used a smaller closet as a bedroom located halfway across the roof toward the front of the building.
Oh, the business my father worked for? An adult bookstore.
The basement when I was about 10 years old. I got put down there after my sister was born, the house only had 2 bedrooms. It was an unfinished basement but my dad made a room for me which was nice, but the basement flooded when there was a lot of rain. No fun to wake up with 1/4" of water on the floor.