Apartment Living

Who watches TV at 7:38 in the morning?

Which leads me to my main point here. The first apartment I lived in after selling my house was good in some ways, bad in others. There was very little sunlight, and the woodwork in the place, it having been built some time in the Twenties, was dark, as was the stain of the hardwood floors. I felt like I was living in a cave. On the bright side, though, the neighbors were quiet. I didn't think of that as I decided to find another place. This time, a loft. A nice, sunny, airy loft. Sure the rent was several hundred dollars more, but it would be worth it, I thought.

I don't mean to type out a list of all the things about this apartment that are annoying.  There IS a view, of the Missouri River, and I can watch trains go by and airplanes taking off and landing at the smallish municipal Kansas City downtown airport. And I can walk out the front of the building and around the corner and catch the street car downtown. That is handy, I'll grant.

But my neighbors.  They are mostly Millennials, I think--I haven't seen a soul around here. Maybe once in awhile in passing. They are mostly loud. Being young, they get drunk on weekends and get a little louder. They have no sense of the etiquette of apartment living, choosing, instead, to act just like they did when they lived with Mom a couple months ago.

I guess it's my age.  It's unsettling to hear muffled male voices whooping and hollering nearby. There is a certain aggressiveness to the tone. I should know. I did all that. A long, long fucking time ago.

Now at this point, I will mention only briefly the thing about the air conditioner units on the roof. I am on the top floor. There are, according to my careful scrutiny of said roof on Google Satellite View, five such units right above me. On the other side of a relatively thin roof. They are loud, and they vibrate. So far, there has been only one day warm enough to cause people to turn on their A/Cs. It was a freakishly warm afternoon in late November. The humming, throbbing, buzzing noise seemed to be coming from inside my skull, rendering this loft apartment, in my humble opinion, totally uninhabitable. The weather cooled later that night. The A/Cs went off and haven't been back on again so far, as winter progresses.  I complained to the management about the noise, someone came by and lamely dismissed the problem, couldn't duplicate it, or some such.I will have to wait until the weather warms and it starts up again so the maintenance people can figure out what is going on. I am not optimistic.

And this is all just leading me to my main main point, which is that I've been looking at real estate. Again. Now that the glitter has rubbed off the apartment living thing, it's easy to see how much money I could save by buying a house, either outright or with the help of a small loan. Either way, principle and interest, and/or taxes and insurance would be roughly half, or less, of what I pay in rent. I have to have at least a rough plan to live a couple more decades--a long enough time that I could conceivably run out of money if I don't start watching it. That would suck.

Now, that was my main point. To set myself up for more blog posts in which I whine and pule about the real estate market. Lots of fodder there. But it gives me something to do. And it's fun to think about one day washing my car in my driveway. It really needs it.