(no subject)

[kitewithfish]

So I'm not going to post pictures of my new place, but know this: I am going to be kind of insufferable about it anyways.

Which means it's time for descriptions! I'll put this under a cut.

Background:

My previous apartment was a renovated attic space with skylights and a deeply pitched roof of a former single family home turned into three apartments.

In the living room/kitchen/dining room, this meant that the height at the walls was shorter than your average seated human, and in the middle of the space, it was over 12 feet - my landlord had to get the extra tall ladder out of storage to get the smoke alarms changed every year.

Which mean great light and a feeling of being super airy and spacious, but also really limited functional wall space to store things. The kitchen had no storage above the cabinet level. There were some really great deep built in cabinets and drawers. We put mugs and cups in drawers, which my short ass loved.

It was also TINY- the whole place was about 500 Sq feet. The kitchen could let two people pass each other by, but not enough to work comfortably. The bathroom was not big enough for a tub - showers only, folks! And the shower was short enough, with a steep enough pitch, that my husband had to duck under the curtain rod to get into the shower. So, not only was the floorplan quite small, lot of it had height restrictions on how to use it.

The new place:

It's about 1000 sq feet, which feels insanely spacious. It's the first floor of a double decker, so I can literally walk from the outside space into my home. The ceilings are tall - like 9 feet? taller?

I've gone from having a place that was a combo kitchen and living and dining room to having literal separate spaces for all of those. Like, a separate room! For each of those things! The kitchen does not have to clean for people to use the dining area! There is a completely separate living room, with lots of windows and absolutely absurd amounts of space! It just feels unreal and absurdly luxurious.

Ok, let me get more useful.

The building is a 2-story condo that was built sometime around 1900 - typical for this neighborhood that really had a population boom as a streetcar suburb and was mostly farmland and shipbuilding before (as in, sailing ships, pre-steam). The design is deeply New England urban- the triple decker (in this case, the shorter double decker) was a really common three story design for a long rectangular house with a single family apartment on each floor - usually two rooms wide at the front and three rooms long on the long side (the rooms being more rectangular than square). With the narrow ends of the building to the street and whatever yard the space had, each floor usually has a front and/or back porch, and a single bathroom.
Most triple deckers are about 100 years old now - they were built as more immigrants moved into the industrializing Northeast after the Civil War to work in factories, and were sold as a means of generational wealth. A family would buy the whole building and live in one unit while renting out the rest - the definition of urban density. (This is the origin of the phrase "one-toilet Irish," for working class immigrant families that had a large family sharing one floor of a triple decker.) Many of these buildings are still owned by a family that rents out the other units, but some, like mine, have been turned into condos.

It's got a shared front porch that is protected by an overhanging three-season room in the second floor condo, and in the back each unit has a porch or a deck that's private and theirs. Ours is massive - it's not included in the floor plan, of course, but it feels roughly the same size as the living room. It's got partial coverage due to the overhang from the upstairs porch. There's a nice little garden in the back, which has been a bit ragged from lack of care, but we're going to figure out how to take care of things with the upstairs folks.

The building's layout has some elements I adore:
-There are no hallways, so you just pass from room to room rather than wasting floorspace on hallways. Each of the public rooms (living, dining, kitchen) have at least two entrances, so even tho there are times when a person will have to block a doorway to access cupboards, you can just circle around them thru the other entrance. The second bedroom functions as a hallway if it's not being used as a bedroom, but can be closed off if you want to.
-There are two pantries, one butler's pantry from the dining to the kitchen which has an EPIC amount of storage and counter space, and one that's like an extra storage space between the kitchen and the doors to the basement and the backyard.
-I'm REALLY happy about the one in the back of the kitchen, because there is nothing more vital in winter than the ability to enter your home via the kitchen, and the pantry gives you an extra spot to take off your boots and gear before you enter the house proper. I have never once entered my childhood family home via the front door that opens into the living room. That's for guests. If you live in a place, by god, you come in thru the kitchen.
- Bedrooms are all on one side of the house, so that the rest of the public space just has a nice flow to it.
-The tub is massive. I love it.

...and now I have to go do stuff, so this will get more detailed later.