jesslyn delia

leah called me around 8:45 this morning to ask me a few questions about my apartment fire for the centretown paper, and as we talked i paced around my apartment and thought about how much i actually do like my new place.

part of the reason i loved our last apartment was because it was so different and quirky. me and matt had a tough time looking for a place because he was still living in hamilton at the time, but we had a few rules set in stone. first, matt was dead set on having hardwood floors. second, we needed to be downtown, or close to downtown. no west end, no orleans, no experimental farm (sorry joelle). we eventually settled for slightly east of ottawa’s byward market/rideau centre, in lowertown, a fifteen-minute walk from shopping, restaurants and tourist attractions like museums and parliament hill. lastly, we had to have a quirky apartment. we didn’t want a standard apartment layout, or just-another-unit in a 20-story high rise.

boring!

this is what most two-bedroom apartments look like, but downtown ottawa can be slightly expensive for a young couple, especially when half of that couple only works part-time while they go to school. to get a place under $900/month you have to be at least a half-hour bus ride outside downtown. so this layout example is actually a lot bigger and nicer than we could have afforded. we had to balance location, cost and the unique apartment we dreamed of having. it wasn’t easy but we found a place, the perfect place. completely different than anything we’d seen anywhere else.

this, my unfortunate paint depiction of our old apartment, is what we ended up getting. and it was perfect!  it didn’t look like any place i’d ever seen, and it was an older building so it was accentuated by gorgeous radiators, high ceilings, large window sills and, yes, hardwood floors.

neat place.

i’m starting to adjust (this can take months for me to do, and by that point everything is always completely different again), and maybe (big maybe) love it just as much as the last place. i definitely don’t want to say that i don’t like it as much, because i’m slightly nervous about an evil spirit overhearing my thoughts and getting upset. but i really did love the last place and i wanted to stay there for years. hopefully a spirit will be able to understand that.

when they told us we could never go back, but that they had a new place for us, i was relieved but nervous. luckily, ottawa has as many unique, old apartments as it does bland high-rise disasters, so we were moved into a place that is just as quirky as the last place. huge windows, high ceilings. it might be even weirder, what with the floors that slant from every outer edge down to the middle of the apartment.

the only problem? no hardwood floors. well, not real ones anyway. but i guess that’s mostly matt’s problem. those damn floors were annoying to clean.