will miss/won't miss project

To bid farewell to our apartment here, we compiled a list of the main things we will miss and won't miss when we're gone. Somebody had the idea to post these on the nyharts blog, so we're going to give it a shot over the next few weeks. Now these may not mean much to many of you dear readers, but until you start paying for this blog, we're just going to post whatever we like here.

Before we launch into that, let us give a hurrah for our apartment in general. We consider ourselves very, very lucky to have lived in such a wonderful place. Our first apartment in New York was nothing short of a major drag. There were roaches, sirens, and highly annoying neighbors (smelly, noisy, scary). The hallways were apparently modeled after an insane asylum and the apartment was poorly laid out. Finding a parking spot in the neighborhood could take up to an hour, and occasionally required a subway ride back to the house.

And then came this place. It was heaven by comparison. Not a single roach in four years here. A beautiful, quiet neighborhood, with resident-only parking. Now, we occasionally have to park up to 100 feet from our front door, but usually it's right out in front. If I forget to lock the car, I can do it from my living room.

And such luxuries within! Dishwashers are uncommon in NYC apartments, in our price range anyway. I know everyone else in America has one, but this little guy has singlehandedly changed our lives.



















Not impressed? This'll get you. We actually have... wait for it... a washer! Inside our house no less. For us, this was huge. Sure, people often have a couple of coin-op washers in their apartment buildings. They're shared by the entire building, usually a hundred people or so, with varying standards of cleanliness. You have to haul all your laundry down to the grimy, smelly basement, and hope against hope that nobody steals your stuff, or removes it from the dryer and throws it on the floor, or that you don't run out of quarters on Saturday night at 10pm. But after moving in here...



















We even got this blessed machine for free from a friend who was moving out. It just happily bounces around in our bathroom, totally clean, no quarters required. Sooooo nice.

Now it is true that this apartment is smaller than our previous unfortunate space. But more than making up for that is access to an attic, nearly the size of the entire apartment. This allows us to keep only the essentials down here with us, though everything else is within easy reach. People around here often pay hundreds of dollars per month for storage spaces of this size, some distance away from their apartments. We got it all right here. Bwahaha.

























Probably the best part about this place is our landlady, Ruth, who has become a good friend. She lives on the two floors beneath us, but has always professed to be happy to hear the kids tromping around above her. She's been generous, too. After the first year, she wasn't going to raise the rent. We insisted that she had to raise it somewhat, at least -- everybody does that. After some of this reverse negotiation on both sides, she agreed to raise the rent by the amount of extra water she was paying for since we moved in. The following year she raised the rent 1%. She often lets the kids go upstairs through her house, which they find endlessly fascinating. She even let me build the kids' bed in her basement, over the course of several weeks. Ruth's the best kind of New Yorker: she's no marshmallow, but has a heart of gold.

With that general tribute, we can start on things we'll miss and things we won't. Check this space in coming days for entries about exciting topics like the Grand Central Parkway, our neighborhood cheese store, and the kitchen sink!