I have learned a lot about my apartment over the last week. Between painting, moving, and unpacking, there is little I’ve done since the beginning of the month except pay attention to my apartment, the space it provides, and the way I exist within that space. While the space might have felt empty, generic, and difficult to occupy initially, I’ve come to know it better since then. I have learned many of its quirks, realized a few of my own, and figured out how to best inhabit the space. While all my packing is not yet finished (and does not even feel close, even though I know I should be done by the end of the weekend following the writing of this post), I know how best to use the space I’ve got with the various pieces of furniture I have brought with me. I might shift some of that around, since even my excellent ability to tell how objects can fit within a space is not infallible, but for the most part I feel like I have figured out my space.

For instance, the floor in the main living space between the stairwell to the second floor and the sliding door to the balcony is uneven. It dips a bit toward the center and the entire thing has a bit of a slope down and to the west. It is a small thing, perhaps a degree or less, but I have trained for years to spot angles that aren’t ninety degrees and things on a screen of any size that are misaligned by even one pixel. Plus, it’s pretty easy to test if you’ve got some screws, finishing nails, or tiny slices of thin wooden doweling you bought a long time ago to replace any shelf pegs that got lost while moving your bookshelves. Just put them on a surface and give them an encouraging push. They will ALWAYS take the opportunity to go rolling off in whatever direct the slope is. Sure, the test isn’t infallible and it’s usually better to use a level, but if you don’t have one, the screw/doweling/finishing nail trick is usually enough to tell you that a slope exists, even if it won’t tell you how much of one there is.

Walking around this apartment is a cacophony of creaks. Whoever installed the flooring did not install particularly strong subflooring, so the forty or so years this building has been around has caused the entire floor to become uneven. Each creak is a sign that the board you’re stepping on has give that the boards next to it do not. The entire second floor (technically third floor, if you look at the building as a whole rather than just my unit within it) creaks with every step, no matter how gently I move and while I might be a very big person, I’m also a very careful walker. I learned long ago how to manage and avoid creaky floorboards, but there’s no way to avoid anything here because every floorboard is creaky. There’s no silent path from any one part of my apartment to any other side. It’s a little annoying, sure, but it does mean I’ll be able to easily identify where anyone in my apartment is just by the sound the floor makes. Not that this is something I expect to need anytime soon, but it’s good to know I’ve got it available if the need ever arises.

The kitchen floor is slightly lower than the rest of the first floor, so there is a small step down when going from the living area to the kitchen that almost always catches me off guard. I’m in no danger of tripping or falling, thankfully, since the drop is less than an inch, but when you’re carefully moving your feet in order to avoid making too much noise, that shift in height is enough to drop your entire weight on the one foot suddenly. That spot is always the loudest creak in my apartment. Even the upstairs landing, which made me worry it might collapse under me when I first viewed the apartment, isn’t as loud.

While this place might be much noisier than my old apartment was, the airflow is much better. Thanks to two large fans, the most powerful of which sits in the main area with the lofted ceiling, it is easy to shift air around in the apartment. While adjustments in temperature settings might have taken most of a day to spread throughout my old apartment, with it’s very closed-off spaces, it takes less than an hour for this apartment to adjust. The upper floor never quite cools off as much as the rest of the apartment does, since the AC unit is below it, but I’ve figured out where to put an oscillating fan to at least keep the air from getting too still and warm (which is very important, since my office is in a closet upstairs and easily the warmest place in my apartment since both I and my computer are in here, generating heat). It is a vast improvement over my other apartment in the summer, so far. It remains to be seen if that will carry over into the winter, but I remain hopeful that the windows here won’t be as terrible and drafty as the windows in my old apartment. The floors definitely won’t be as cold, since I’m not sitting directly on top of an exposed foundation anymore. Now I’m sitting on top of someone else’s apartment, so I should get heat from them.

Best of all, I can’t hear anyone walking around above me. There’s no living space above mine other than the second floor of my own apartment. There is nothing here to creak in the night, no small dogs scampering and yapping at all hours, no garage door opening at random intervals in the night, no loud noise of someone thumping around for half an hour when they get home from a late shift at work. All I’ve got to deal with (in terms of other people influencing my experience of my apartment) is the smell of someone in the building smoking in a way that its getting inside the walls and exiting through gaps in the drywall in my bathroom and closet (one of which is mostly fixed and the other of which is being fixed as I’m writing this). Really not sure how the smell of cigarettes is traveling so widely in my building, since it is only the bathroom and a nearby closet where the smell is present and the hallway outside my door (less than ten feet away from both the closet and the bathroom) is completely free of it. Maybe someone a floor below is smoking inside the building. That wouldn’t explain how it’s getting in the walls, though.

All said, I think this has been an improvement. I hope to be proven right as time goes on, but I think I’ll reserve judgment until the horrible cigarette smoke smell goes away. You’d think that being the in bathroom would prepare you for unpleasant odors, but nothing compares to the stale, disgusting smell of cigarette smoke seeping in from somewhere else. Given that my noise is even more sensitive to disruption that my ears are, this one thing could be a deal-breaker for me. I just hope it goes away so I don’t feel like I need to escape this apartment so soon after moving in…