Weekend Plans Post: My First Apartment
One of my buddies has made mention about how his oldest is talking about moving out and getting his own place. And that had memories of My First Apartment flood back into me.
My mom had a lot of siblings and the youngest of the group lived with my grandparents until she was, like, 24. This was amusing to no end, back in the 80’s. “Still living at home at 24!”, we’d say, as we drove back to our own house.
Well, I moved out at 25. It was different, we all told each other. Hey, the 80’s were another country. It was 1997, after all. Anyway, I was fixing to get married and, dangit, it was time for me to get my own place. So I got my own place. Aspen Court Apartments (since condemned, renovated, and reopened as “Morning Wood Apartments” (I am not making that up)) had a lovely little 440 square foot apartment available. $330/month, heat included. This struck me as kind of expensive but something that I was pretty sure that I’d be able to raise each month despite my nigh-minimum wage job ($8/hr) because, hey, I had just gotten hired at a Global Conglomerate computer company and computer jobs were The Future.
The front room had wood floors in the front room and there was space for bookshelves and a loveseat and a computer table and I put a foot locker a few feet away from the front door and I put my big-ol’ boom box on top of the foot locker so that, when visitors came over, we could listen to the radio as background music as we discussed how I should get a television.
Walking out of the front room took you into a hallway/kitchen with a fridge, sink, two feet of counterspace, and then a stove. I had a dishrack that covered about 75% of the counterspace.
Then it was the bedroom that had a bed in it and a dresser. You could open the dresser drawers all the way if you didn’t stand between the dresser and the bed.
Then there was the bathroom that was about as wide as the kitchen/hallway with a sink, toilet, bathtub with shower fixture. (I used up a good deal of real estate next to the tub by putting some of those plastic shelves there to hold our bath towels for easy access.)
And that was that. 440 square feet. 4 rooms. Or two rooms and two hallways with a lot of amenities. $330/month. Plus heat.
I spent my evenings listening to music (at a nice low level, of course… the walls were thin as heck) and reading and wondering if I should price a television set. Televisions were so expensive, though! Not even talking about the new plasma sets but even the more quality CRTs! Luckily, I (we) got a 13″ TV/VCR combo for Christmas that year.
We put it on top of the dresser.
And now I look back at that and howl with laughter. $330/month! That was NOTHING. And we were surrounded by people who couldn’t manage to scrounge up $330/month! And they were selling drugs! (I make that assumption because a neighbor told us, as we were moving out, that we were the only people in the complex who didn’t sell drugs, you see.)
And so now I think about my buddy’s kiddo moving out and getting his own place… and I look at apartments that they have here in town and I think “$900 bucks a month!!! How in the heck would anybody just moving out and getting their own place be able to afford that???”
And I am just glad that, hey, I’m old. And this weekend will be spent thinking about that.
So… what’s on your docket?
(Featured Image is the Google Street View of Morning Wood Apartments. It’s changed a lot. Not totally… you can still see the bones of where we used to live… but it’s changed a lot.)
The apartment I lived in right after I PCS’d here cost $1000/month in 1997. Looks like they’ve been renovated and now rent is $1250/month. Not bad.Report
Location matters, I guess. My first apartment, late 80s into early 90s was in downtown Ann Arbor, in a secure building*. A studio, at $600 a month. Water and heat/AC were paid for, and maybe electric too? I don’t remember if I had an account.
(*I had looked at some of the old-house apartments that were cheaper and most of them had front doors one good kick would stove in, and the interiors were not any more secure. I was having some…issues…at that time and needed to be somewhere I could lock certain people out of)
It was small and sometimes depressing but it was secure and wasn’t a bad place to live. I was six stories up and had a nice view. I shudder to think what it would rent for now. (The building – Maynard House – still stands but the University has taken it over and rents it out as apartment-housing for students. I bet I wouldn’t recognize the place if I went back)
More recently, here, I had a 2-bedroom for $350 a month – I moved out of that in 2001. It was a very basic apartment with ugly Berber carpeting and not enough lighting and I paid for electrical (the heat and ac were electric, and I think the hot water heater was too). It was not as nice as the Ann Arbor apartment in some ways, for one, the walls were MUCH thinner and I could hear my upstairs neighbors playing first-person shooter games into the wee smalls. And I could smell their cigarettes. And they’d flick their butts down onto my patio, even though I asked them not to. Though in retrospect that was probably preferable to the time during the dry spell when one went wide of the mark and burned part of the lawn up….
I moved out because I bought a house. I bought a house (before I had tenure, even) because the management complained I had too many books and they posed a “fire hazard” (the books were all neatly on shelves, it was NOT a Collier Brothers situation). I figured it wasn’t worth fighting and I was NOT going to rent a storage unit (which they so conveniently said they had available to rent) for my books, so I just bought a house.
(If my books caught fire, there’d have to already be a fire in the apartment, or it would have to be above 451 degrees Fahrenheit in there, in either of those cases the landlord would have bigger problems than that I had several hundreds of books)
I own far more books now. That landlord can suck it.Report
Oh my gosh! Ann Arbor! We had moved to New York by that point but my aunt was still living with my grandparents in Chelsea! (We moved away from Canton which was a sneeze-and-you-miss-it township next to Plymouth.)
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IIRC, Chelsea was where the Jiffy Mix milling plant was. I remember we drove past there a few times on field trips for the botany classes I took. (I didn’t have a car when I lived in Ann Arbor; parking was ridiculous)Report
Yep, the Jiffy Mix plant was on the other side of town from Gran’s. (If your car pool ever stopped for gas in Chelsea, you had a shot at getting gas across the street from Gran’s house! (probably not, unless you drove through town to get it))
I imagine that Ann Arbor in 1988 is another country completely from what it’s doing now.Report
I have not been back there since. I also haven’t been back to the town I grew up in (NE Ohio) since 1989, when my parents moved away from there. I’ve looked it up online and the little downtown has become SO much more “corporate” (e.g., Talbot’s and Starbucks replacing the little individual-owned businesses that used to be there. The bookstore – the Learned Owl – is probably the only shop that’s still there that i remember from my childhood)
I HAVE been back to where I went to grad school; my mom still lives in that town. It has changed a lot in 20 years. The town where I live now has changed a lot, too, but I think you notice the changes less when you live in a place.Report
You prompted me to spend some time with Google Maps this morning.
All of the apartments I lived in during college have been razed and replaced with commercial property, churches, something. I assume rental prices in those student ghettos have gone up a lot as the supply declined. My first apartment was an easy walk/bicycle ride from campus. If the apartment still existed that wouldn’t be true: it would be on the wrong side of a four-lane parkway that didn’t exist then with no convenient crossing. The apartment and assorted houses I lived in while I was in New Jersey are still standing. Aside from the trees being much larger, they all look relatively unchanged. The house in Colorado where I’ve lived for the last 32 years (less two weeks) is still here, of course, also with much bigger trees.Report
Nice post Jay, I had moved out at 18 with my sister and a boyfriend at 18 but this made me think of my first apartment on my own at age 25 in the early 90’s. It was right off Pearl and Colfax in Denver. 1910 building with teeny apartments. It was 320ish square fee for I think $285/month You’d come in the front door and small bathroom on left and the living room/bedroom on your right. Had a full size Murphy bed that rolled into the wall above which was a well, full bed size closet. next to which was a minuscule galley kitchen with half sized appliances and no counter to speak of. On the plus side it had a tiny balcony that I shared with Augie the guy next door. Actually kind of loved that apartment. Taki’s Golden Bowl and a Mexican place that made fresh tortillas were right out on Colfax. I had heard they combined two apartments to make condos out of them at one point but I went to google maps to look and apparently the apartments are now a parking lot for Natural Grocers and Taki’s is now a McDonaldsReport
Ooo, that first apartment. Right. I moved out at 18, even though I was a townie. I moved out because a month or so post HS, my friend Fil and I hitchhiked and generally bummed around the British isles and when I retruned (one heck of story there!) my soon-to-be step mother had moved in. Well, the two of us are like oil and water, so out I went. My mother owned a property management company, and hooked me and another friend up with a special deal. You see, she had a building, a converted mansion (though you had to look really close to see that) that was going to be renovated, but as the tenants, many long term, were moving out she needed someone around to be there until the end, but could move out quickly. So, there I was. One block from downtown, no one in the building but Jonno and I. Oh, it was good!Report
Bopped around in apartments with roommates during grad school… but the first place I’d call my own was the “honeymoon” cottage my wife and I moved into just below Skyline Drive. Lovely views, beautiful sunsets. We got married, moved cross country, started new jobs and set-up house in the same week. Not sure I’d advise a young couple to do that… then again, not sure that I wouldn’t.
For the Minnesota faction here, I met my wife in St. Paul where I was living with a pal on Cathedral Hill a couple blocks from W.A.Frost… I understand its almost trendy to live there now.Report
Now you’re making me pine for a walleye sandwich at Tavern on Grand.Report
Man, now I’m thinking about a snap visit to the in-laws… then breakfast at Day-by-day… and a visit to Half Time Wreck. On the way up, we’ll get a burger and fried onions at Hackneys.Report