Flibbertigibbet

So Close, Yet So Far

When I moved to Astoria, I moved into a hell hole.

The apartment is old and not well maintained. It was dirty. Filthy. Dirty. I'm not talking about simple clutter or disrepair. I'm talking about dirt.

I moved in with the utmost optimism, but since March my sunny outlook on the possibility of the apartment has given way to a less than benevolent view of things.

I really believe that the only reason we haven't been carried away by rats and roaches is due to the hardware store downstairs which seems to emit a steady stream of pesticide and poison that seeps into everything. You get used to the smell after a while, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe it's unhealthy.

Since I moved in, however, one of my roommates, The Actor, and I have been working our butts off to fix and clean things up. (He works at it a lot harder than I do, actually.) We've:

- Refinished the floors
- Hung a new cabinet in the kitchen
- Repainted almost every room in the apartment.
- Repainted much of the trim
- Installed a new sink in the bathroom
- Installed a new medicine cabinet in the bathroom
- Repainted the stairs and walls in the main hall
- Repaired a damaged part of the ceiling in the main hall
- Put numbers on the apartment doors
- Re-secured the fire ladder to the roof
- Put down vinyl tile in the entryway
- Put up bookshelves in our hallway
- Sealed the skylight so that it doesn't leak anymore

And all sorts of other odds and ends. The neighbors helped with some of the painting in the main hall. The Law Student has not helped with anything except to grudgingly pick me and The Actor up from Home Depot and to take us to Ikea once or twice. The Landlord hasn't done much except he did provide us with a few supplies, some of the paint, and odds and ends. He also bought us a pizza one day while we were painting in the hall.

I wish you could have seen it before and compare it to the way it is now. It really is an incredible transformation. I am so sick of it eating up my free time, though, and I'm sure The Actor is over it, too. As mentioned, he has done more work on it than me.

We're not done, though. There's still some little odds and ends that have to be done. We need to finish painting the baseboards and trim. We need to clean the kitchen again. (We've cleaned our apartment so many times that I am now satisfied enough to say that it is no longer filthy.) I need to paint over some holes that I made by mistake and patched. There're a few other things as well.

We set a goal to have all of this stuff done for a party for Independence Day and we are almost there. We're SO close but we still have several hours more worth of work that needs to be done.

I can't wait!

When it's all done, I might take some pictures for you to see. I really wish I had taken "before" pictures, though. It's finally becoming a place fit for human habitation.