Hooray for college apartments. Though this one was actually a lot better than I expected it to be. Sure there was still a gross stain on one of the mattresses, the couches were an ugly brown color, and the laundromat was pretty far away, but it was home.
I thought my apartment was so big when I first moved in. But that was probably because it was empty. It didn't look that big once I moved all my stuff inside. But I didn't care. Everything was so new and exciting, and for the first time ever, I was living on my own! I remember how fun it was to decorate and decide where to put all of my stuff. On the day we moved in, my roommates and I divided up the cupboards and drawers and then got work! It took me forever to unpack because I was kinda a perfectionist about it. My closet needed to be color coded and I lined all of my drawers with floral scented drawer liners.......yeah I went a little overboard. But as the school year went on I calmed down a little bit...or a lot bit. I don't think I made my bed once during second semester and there were usually more clothes on the floor than there were clothes on hangers.
Over the two semesters that I lived there, I learned all of apartment 229's secrets: the oven door was insanely squeaky, water spilled out of the sink all too easily, and the walls (and ceiling) were paper thin. If you wanted to sing along to your iPod without being embarrassed, you needed to make sure that the entire building was gone, not just your roommates, because literally everyone could hear everything. My neighbors really liked to play guitar and sing along to Les Mis and The Little Mermaid, for example. I never felt the need to go to a karaoke night or concert or anything like that because I could just stay home and listen to my neighbors sing! It was the best!!!!! (That was sarcasm.)
And about that paper thin ceiling... Nothing ever fell through it or anything like that, but I swear my upstairs neighbors were elephants or something. Either that or they were stopping, dropping, and rolling 24-7 because I don't know what else could have possibly made as much noise as they did. Becca, Lisa, and I had to come up with creative ways to convey our annoyance, and we got to know our apartment's ceiling pretty well. We would jump up and down on the couch and hit the ceiling with our hands, hoping that the noise from below would hush our neighbors up. When that didn't work I grabbed the broom and used the handle to hit the ceiling. You should probably never do that because you might accidentally dent the ceiling. Not like I would know or anything....
During:
Packing up my entire life is probably one of the most exhausting and stressful things I've ever had to do. But after approximately ten hours of cleaning, laundry, and shoving stuff into boxes, I finally got everything finished.
And, as an added bonus, I learned a couple of valuable things about myself and about the world while I was packing/cleaning:
1. I have too many shoes.
2. Trying to make a bunch of pots and pans fit nicely into one box is the most difficult thing you will ever have to do.
3. Sometimes the best thing you can do for something is to throw it away.
4. I am a professional counter-climber (I scaled lots of dangerous kitchen counters in order to reach high-up cupboards. It gave me quite the adrenaline rush, and I'm now thinking about dropping out of school to climb counters full time).
5. Fridges are disgusting.
6. Once you think you've packed everything, something else will magically appear (but only after you've already taped all the boxes shut).
7. Those big, blue Ikea bags are a gift from heaven.
8. Packing makes you hungry. So hungry you might eat an entire large pizza by yourself. You shouldn't feel guilty about this, it happens to everyone.
9. Packing makes you hate yourself for having so much stuff and makes you never want to go shopping ever again. Like ever.
10. Packing sucks.
After:
I don't live there anymore so there's nothing to really say. I also forgot to take pictures of the empty apartment but it's okay because life goes on and math still sucks.
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