Even when Douglas and I moved into our first apartment in 1968–a studio in an ancient tenement building on the upper East Side of Manhattan with lots of roaches that apparently hid when we looked at the place–I wanted to make my home beautiful.
We bought a long, lovely birchwood dresser with eight drawers, since the apartment was sorely missing storage space; a small cherrywood table that opened up to become a much bigger table, because I loved to have dinner parties, and two pretty white ginger jar lamps that sat on the dresser. I always adored buying bedding, towels, kitchen equipment, and tabletop products, too!
Many apartments later, I have officially moved into my first full-fledged home–at 69, no less!
I now own three gigantic Rubbermaid garbage cans on wheels (I make most of every attempt to recycle); I (sort of) understand how a boiler works to provide heat; when a pipe leaks, I can’t rely on a superintendent who lives in the building to fix it (although the man who is going to live in the rental apartment on the ground floor is mighty handy.)
I have a working bathroom, the cable and Internet are hooked up, and I am sleeping in my own comfy bed after spending two months on strange beds in temporary studios (sans roaches). Although the kitchen faucet and countertops haven’t arrived yet, the refrigerator is working, so I can keep a supply of seltzer! Now that the weather is getting cooler, I have been wearing the same three pairs of ‘workout’ pants over and over (I do wash them frequently in the laundromat since the washing machine isn’t hooked up yet).
My ‘office’ is set up on a tacky card table I bought at Target, surrounded by tools, paint cans, stray screws and nails, and papers I haven’t been able to file for months since the filing cabinets are buried behind mountains of cartons. When it’s time to eat, my Target work table becomes a dining table. If I had a baby, the table would undoubtedly work as a changing table, too.
