“DENNIS!” I screamed into the stairwell of my fourplex apartment building. “TURN IT OFF!”
My landlord had spent the past half hour with his head under my kitchen sink, fixing a minor leak. After proclaiming “That should do it,” he confidently headed downstairs to turn my unit’s water back on. A minute later, water began fire-hose blasting from the sink pipe onto the kitchen floor.
After turning the water off, Dennis returned sheepishly to my flooded kitchen to find me standing with jeans soaked to the knees while all three towels I owned lay sopping in the puddle. He started to ask about more towels, then shook his head. “I’ll get the shop vac.”
Such was my first foray into renting a place by myself. I’d hoped it would be better than my senior-year college house—which my roommate called “this brown shithole,” not un-affectionately—where the kitchen wallpaper was vegetable-patterned and my bedroom had no windows.
But, as my solo apartment experience proved, even the nicest places are not immune to human error.
Apart from college-owned housing, I’ve been renting for nearly eight years. Each flat, apartment, and house has been its own adventure. I’ve lived in them with friends, acquaintances, my husband—and a Craigslist roommate who moved chicken leftovers to the balcony when she decided I’d kept them in the fridge too long.
Each place had its own joys and heartbreaks, inextricably linked in my memory to the walls in which they happened. I had to curb my sentimentality when moving from each rental, reminding myself that I carried the experiences with me even when closing the door for the last time.
At these homes I got to meet such eccentric neighbors as Hottub Dave, “Granny” who tried to set us with her forty-something grandson, and the family who blasted Backstreet Boys on their outdoor speakers at 11:30 at night. One day, a neighbor with a nail gun came by to help me construct a ramshackle dog fence out of junk two-by-fours (“You’ve been pounding away with that hammer for thirty minutes and it was making me crazy,” he said, finishing the job for me in about five minutes).
And then there were the maintenance requests. I don’t think I’ve lived in a single apartment that hasn’t had a water-related disaster. There have been several rotting subfloors. A basement that flooded to the point that mushrooms grew. An $800 water bill. A puddle that was first blamed on my dog before the true, burst-pipe culprit was discovered.
In Madison, my housemates and I often came home to notes left from maintenance guys detailing what repair they attempted, with varying success. After waiting a week for a replacement microwave, we finally returned to find a shiny new one installed. The first thing I did was try to open it. The hinge on the side hit the wall, preventing the microwave from opening more than five inches. Monica had to tear me away after I spent ten minutes videoing the failed door in a fit of rage.
Instead of installing a different type of microwave, maintenance came back, removed the giant cabinet apparatus the microwave was attached to, and moved it a single inch to the right. The microwave opened successfully thereafter.
That house, our hundred-year-old Gorham place, was a disaster. It was filled with such invaders as bats, mice, centipedes. Squirrel residents in the attic and walls. Carpet beetles which looked like bedbugs. And an abundance of wolf spiders under the eaves.
The day we moved in was the first time I saw this house that my friends had picked out. It was beautiful from the outside, with light blue shakes and red-rimmed windows. But I smacked my head on the stairwell ceiling when first lugging my boxes up. The shower had a slanted ceiling so that there was only a two-and-a-half foot area in the shower where I, the tallest roommate, could fully stand.
But despite a place’s faults, you make the best of it, as Philip shared last week. We could’ve seen the excessive nail-marks in the wall as holes, but we chose to see them as opportunities—convenient holders for tiki umbrellas during our tropical-themed party. We grew to love the place for its wood floors, its incredible open spaces, and the fun we shared within its quirky walls. We got it painted, brought in wood chips to cover the muddy, grassless yard. José, the pet bird I had since childhood, is buried under a stone in the backyard.
In a college art class, I painted a series of small portraits of the three homes I grew up in. The paintings show the houses in their imperfect glory: crooked lanterns, chipped stairways, weedy lawns. But they also show the signs of the life that was lived there: the swingset I played on, the grill we cooked from, the plants my mom and dad cultivated. They show the love that can exist within a modest-looking home.
A year after moving, I added a portrait of Gorham house to my series.
Josh and I now live in a spacious basement apartment in a house owned by George, an elderly Greek man who lives upstairs. George and his family have been hospitable and kind, graciously working with us when issues come up. The backyard, which sits right in front of a ravine, is longer than a football field and gets explored joyfully by our dog. In the spring, a giant magnolia tree blooms brilliant pink. We eat three meals a day outside between May and October. Last week, I started a painting of this house with the blooming magnolias in the foreground.
Josh and I might settle down in a smaller border city next year to be closer to my family. We’ll rent for one more year, then hopefully find a house to buy. There will be no maintenance requests, only our own initiative to solve issues. I’m already looking forward to the memories we’ll make there.
Laura graduated from Calvin in 2015 with a degree in art and writing. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her husband Josh and dog Rainy. She works as an IT support analyst and enjoys painting, rock climbing, and exploring the city.
