My downstairs neighbor moved out a couple of weeks ago, and after spending every day last week gutting the apartment, this week they've begun to restock it. When I say they gutted it, I am not exaggerating. They took out (and left piled on the back patio, where most of it still remains) the fridge, dishwasher, all the carpet, all the lightning fixtures, the ceiling fan, all the bathroom and kitchen cabinets, the sinks, the linoleum floor from the kitchen and bathroom, and possibly the light switches and doorknobs. It's like a Cadillac left in a bad part of town; there's nothing left but the frame; cement floors and bare walls, which are sure to be repainted the same colorless off-white that every other wall in every other apartment in California is inflicted with.
The stripping was pretty annoying, since they began at 8am, and they were not gentle. It usually sounded like they were using a crowbar and hammer to pry the ceiling loose, and since this was going on about 6 inches below my bedroom floor, no, I didn't find it all that enjoyable to try sleep through. Today was even better, since they were putting in new cabinets and cutting the faux-granite counter tops to fit, on site. Well, out on the sidewalk, directly below my living room window. I've never heard stone cut with a hand saw, and I doubt I ever will since stone is too hard and has to be cut with special tools in a mill. The faux-granite epoxy counters they put in apartments though, are just huge slabs of plastic. They can be cut with hand-held circular saws, though not without tremendous high pitched screeching sounds.
In a happy coincidence, today was the first day in about a week that it was cool enough to leave the windows open all day, instead of closing them and running the A/C. Nice that I had such a quiet, peaceful day to work on a novel and enjoy the peaceful, quiet suburbs.
Worse yet, it turns out that drinking too much red wine with leftover lunchtime pizza doesn't allow you to block out the sounds. At least I tried, damnit!
Adding to the fun, the couple that lives next door are moving out, in the slowest moving out process ever seen by man. Friday they had two big guys over to help, and they carried out the couch and bed and dresser and other large objects. I don't know how many they had; their apt is just a one bedroom like mine, but there certainly seemed to be a lot of trips moving past my front window and down the stairs. They didn't rend a truck, just stuffed the junk into the back of someone's pickup.
There were few signs of life over the weekend, but today the moving out continued, with the aid of the woman's mom, or so I judged by the similar appearance, ethnicity, and 30ish year age difference between her and my neighbor. (She's white, mom's white, husband's short and Hispanic.) I've seen at least 40 or 50 trips up and down the stairs, usually while burdened with hardly more than a shoebox, or a bunch of clothing on hangars. The husband just struggled down the stairs with two bulging trash bags full of uncrushed aluminum cans, FFS. Way to plan ahead, kids.
I have no idea how it can take so many trips for 2 people and an assistant to clean out a one bedroom apt, but I guess if you don't get big boxes at a U-haul store, don't pack stuff neatly into them, and don't get them all ready in advance, it can pretty well eat up an entire day/weekend, then spill over into a Monday spent grabbing whatever you can lay hands on and carrying it out to an SUV, thus requiring dozens and dozens of trips up and down the stairs carrying 10-15lbs a trip, instead of 10 trips with 60 pounds each. Up to, and including, bulky bags of aluminum cans you should have recycled last week, when you had nothing better to do.
It's silly too, since someone's always moving into this apt complex, and there are always stacks of perfectly good moving boxes in the trash area. I've got 25 or 30 of them (flattened and folded) in my storage space, scavenged from various stacks left out for free/trash in the year and a half I've lived here. I don't know when I'll move from here, but when that blessed day arrives I do know I'll rent a goddamned U-Haul, press some friends into labor, and do it all in one trip.
I think one bedroom apts bring out the worst in our "do it ourselves" instincts. No one tries to move a full house by themselves, or by borrowing a friend's truck, etc. You hire movers, since there will be dozens and dozens of big boxes, couches, beds, furniture, tools, small appliances, vacuums, dishes, lawn equipment, etc. You've got to spend weeks before you move and months after you move packing/unpacking and organizing, but no one in their right mind tries to do it by making a bunch of trips in some friend's pickup. And not just because when people move houses, they're generally moving further than across town.
A lightly-furnished two-bedroom might bring out similar DIY stupidity, but even then I think the necessity of renting a U-Haul would be evident. No one's got a friend with a pickup that will hold 2 beds, 2 mattresses, 2 box springs, dressers, etc, not to mention all the rest of the household furniture.
Which leaves one bedroom dwellers as the only ones who can try to get away with moving on the cheap. If you've got Ikea furniture and are handy, you could theoretically disassemble bulky objects like beds and tables, stack up bookcases and chairs and desks, squeeze in boxes of clothing and books and dishes, and move in several trips. Of course, as anyone who has moved in recent years will tell you, your stuff always takes at least 50% more space than you anticipated. But if you live not too far from where you're moving, and you have access to the new place at least a week before you've got to be out of the old one, and you don't mind the drive, and you've access to a truck for the big stuff, it's probably doable. It's not wise; it will consume dozens of hours of your time and keep you from doing just about anything else during the weeks beforehand, but it's doable.
Even then, I'd recommend renting a U-Haul. You can easily put an entire one bedroom apt into one of their smaller trucks, providing you've obtained big moving boxes and packed them wisely, and the money you'd spend on gas making a dozen trips will easily add up to more than the one day or weekend truck rental will cost. Not to mention the dozens of hours you'll save not making all those back and forth trips. I think psychologically it's better to move all at once, too. Plan in advance and spend an entire day packing. Get everything stored away, logically and neatly, leave out only the necessities, and then the next morning when you load it all into the truck you'll empty your entire apt in order. No running out of clean clothing since everything's packed, none of that "which box did I put the toaster into?" bullshit as you drag out your moving for a week. And when you get to your new location, you've got everything ready to unload and sort out. And you'll do it, since you need to unpack to go back to living your typically over-stimulated, utterly possession-reliant, modern Western Civilization lifestyle. Whereas if you move in pieces, you'll have the stuff you use most often out first, and will just leave boxes of other crap sitting around for weeks.
Oddly, given the obsessiveness of this post, I've not seriously thought about moving any time lately. I do consider it now and then; just because I don't currently have anything (job, relationship, college) really tying me to the Bay Area, and I could live just about anywhere else for far less money. Just for instance, there are
countless nice 1 or 2 bedroom apartments in Denver for $500 or less a month. I'm paying $1100 for a nice 1 bedroom here, and there's
nothing in the area for less than $900, unless you want to dodge bullets in Oakland or live way, way east by east east East Bay. (And rents were higher 2 years ago when I moved, before the housing bubble burst.)
I've got no reason to want to live in Denver, but there are plenty of other places in the country I could probably be just as happy as I am here. And even if not, $600 a month would buy a fair amount of happiness. Or at least massage whores and Tanqueray, which are just as good.
Labels: apartment, economics
