Spring is here and with the warmer temperatures we will soon be opening our windows up. This is also when I start to regret buying a house on a busy street. I love my house, don't get me wrong, I just don't like where it is. When we were trying to sell it a couple of years ago (oh, and holy crap am I glad that we didn't end up selling it too by the way. With the economy the way it is currently, I'm quite happy with a mortgage that I can afford thank you very much) one of the main motivators was how much traffic noise there is here. Say what you will about winter but at least it's quieter in my house when all the windows are closed. I dread motorcycle season.
This house is the first place I've lived that wasn't an apartment. When we were looking I briefly thought about looking at 2 family houses but quickly realized that I was really tired of living above, below or right next to someone else. I wanted a single family house so that whatever noise there may be, it came from us. Although on a busy street that really isn't true either. But I digress (whatta surprise!).
I spent the first 16 years of my life living in a first floor apartment of a little 2 family house. The people who owned the place lived right upstairs and didn't allow my dad to park his car in the driveway. Another weird "feature" of that place was the fact that we didn't have any real doors (the exception being the bathroom door). All the doors were removed and replaced with those accordion door things. Y'know, the ones that don't offer anything in the way of privacy? Nor do they block sound or light which is a problem if your bedroom is right off of the kitchen. You know what sucks? Being a 15 year old boy with 3 sisters and no real door on your bedroom. We eventually moved to a shitty complex (Bryant Terrace HOLLA!) a few blocks over. I still have relatives living over there and the apartments are not a depressing as I remember. I think it may have been my own attitude (shocking isn't it?). I finally got a for-realsies door though.
After the college thing (long story) I moved out and had a series of apartments until I met Amy (The Wiff). Our first place together was this tiny place in Allston. Since neither of us drove it didn't bother us that there was never anywhere to park in the neighborhood. Unfortunately this apartment was near a couple of frat houses so 2 a.m. wake-up-calls for drunk morons smashing things on the street became the norm. When these instances started happening on Tuesdays, we realized that maybe we should move. Oh, that and the time that somebody got stabbed right below our bedroom window (actual quote: "Dude! You STABBED ME!!"). Yea, that may have been the motivating factor.
We then moved to the International House of Whack-jobs in Somerville. I should have guessed that this would not be a great place to live when I got hit by a car on my bike while I was on my way to meet up with Amy to see the apartment. Kind of a cosmic warning shot across my bow (except it was in the form of a Jaguar and it did in fact hit me). The apartment itself was ok but there were a number of incidents that made us move out a little more than a year later. The one that stands out was I was in the living room and I kept hearing this huge THUD! sound coming from our kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and sort of stood there waiting for the noise to happen again. I didn't have to wait long. THUD! Hmm, it's not coming from the THUD! kitchen, it appears to be coming THUD! from the apartment directly THUD! above THUD! us (there were 6 apts total in the building, we were on the second floor). What the fuck are they THUD! doing up there?
So I went up the back stairway to our neighbor's back THUD! door. I knocked (ok, I pounded) on the door and waited for the door to open. Nothing. THUD! THUD! THUD! It was increasing in intensity. I banged again. Finally a little dude opened the door and he was holding a baseball bat. Ok, didn't see that coming. He didn't seem hostile or anything and so I asked him if he could keep the noise down. Meanwhile the door was still creeping open (the whole building was sinking in the middle due to it being constructed of balsa wood and paper-mâché on a crumbling foundation of stale cookies) to reveal that there were 2 other guys in there also with bats standing around the kitchen table. Laying on the table was a giant slab of some indeterminate meat (goat? lamb?). They were tenderizing it. I cannot make this shit up. I said "What was all that banging anyway?" So, one of the guys showed me. He reeled back and gave the side of meat an all-mighty whack. His once white T-shirt I noticed had a fine mist of blood covering his belly. He grinned at me. Carry on men. I'll be perusing the apartment listings of the local paper thank you very much.
At the time I had a job working for CSG doing energy audits for people (same company as the Hate Bus, different gig. I'll explain later in another installment of Vocational Errors) so I got to see quite a variety of places that may be potential rentals. As it turned out, one of my customers had a place for rent right down the street in an old funky building. He had cut up this gorgeous building into 8 separate apartments of descending quality. I think we got the flagship apartment. The landlord guy (Dan I think?) was a grade-A nut job who cut so many corners on his renovations to that place that it had reached the point where things were really starting to fall apart. But there was no one beating up dead animals there so we moved in.
Everything seemed ok for a bit and then we started to notice that not only was Dan odd but he was also home all the goddamned time. He had all these bizzarro rules and regulations which he posted all over the common areas of the building. He drove us crazy (Amy more so as he would talk to her a lot). In the basement below our apartment was an illegal apartment. The guy who rented this one was a male stripper who would practice at home with the windows open. Oh, come on man. How am I supposed to compete with that? Invest in some fucking shades will ya? He would blast this god awful techno bullshit that would thump thump thump me into a blind fury. I would stomp on the floor trying to get him to understand that there is a pasty white guy up here who not only doesn't want to be reminded of how he is soooo not qualified to be a stripper but would like a little quiet please. Sometimes he'd turn it down and sometimes he wouldn't. He didn't know that I knew where the fuse panel for his apartment was. I would just turn his power off. I dunno if he ever figured out it was me or if he just thought his stereo was too powerful.
It was all these little battles and petty arguments over space that made me pine for a place of my own. A place not attached to someone else's place. We've been here since 1998 now and have come to the conclusion that all those projects that we figured would be "the next guy's problem" are in reality our problem. We ARE the "next guys". Last week I had a friend of mine who does construction come over and give me some advice on a kitchen renovation. This could be huge. I think I love my house.
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