Our Place

Well, how silly of me.  Here I am, talking about the cool things going on around the neighborhood and espousing the virtues of Ikea, and I haven't even talked about one of the more important aspects of our move:  our apartment!

I had a few people ask me to put up pictures of the place when we first moved in, but I did my best to stall.  Mostly because it looked a bit like this:

In other words, it was a total mess!  But that's to be expected, I suppose.  With all of the moving and boxes and mess and all...  The real problem, though, was our complete lack of furniture.  No desks (the card table definitely wasn't going to accommodate both of us), no bed, no ... anything!

That all changed a couple of days later after we went to Ikea (which I promise I won't mention again unless I get some sort of sponsorship) and started to get unpacked and settled in.  As I mentioned in a previous post, we bought a couple of desks and a mattress, and the place started to look a little better.  Until we get more furniture, this is what the place looks like now:

The computer room.

The bedroom and closet.

Last but not least, the kitchen!

I did mention that the place was pretty small, didn't I?  If you'll notice, I made sure at least part of the bed was in every shot just to give some sense of scale.  And I guess I didn't get any pictures of the corner that has the door and the refrigerator, but ... you get the idea.

You may also notice that I didn't mention the bathroom.  That's mostly because there isn't one.  Not in the traditional "my apartment comes with its very own bathroom" sort of way.  You see, three of the other apartments on our floor are also tiny-ass studios with no bathroom, so we share one!  Or, more accurately, one bathroom and two individual shower rooms.  It's really not as bad as it sounds (unless you wake up in the middle of the night with a very sudden urge to pee).  They get cleaned fairly regularly, and not by me.  That's right ... I don't have to clean a bathroom ever.  And since we only share it with three or four other people, it's rarely occupied when you need it.  Yeah, it does get a little gross every now and then, but I've certainly suffered much worse.  And did I mention that I never have to clean it?

There are a couple of other neat things about our place.  First and foremost is the location.  Moving up here from so far away, we really didn't know a whole lot about the neighborhoods themselves.  As it turns out, Queen Anne is a pretty cool place!  We're close to Seattle Center, which is kind of touristy, but there are always cool things going on.  We can walk to three different grocery stores, tons of restaurants, and if we want to go downtown, we can either walk (if we're feeling spunky ... it's about a mile and a half) or take the Seattle Center Monorail.

Neither one of us have really utilized the other neat thing about our place yet.  Our building has a back yard!  Complete with a deck that has a BBQ grill, a smoker, and a picnic table!  Not to mention a couple of shady little corners for reading or getting cozy with your portable gaming device of choice, I suppose.  I don't have any pictures of the back yard yet, but I'll take a few once I actually go check it out.  Which I'll probably do sometime over the next couple of days...  It gets a little warm in here sometimes!

Come to think of it, I don't have any pictures of the outside of our place either, but I do have this Google street view thing I can share.  It's been painted since the last time the Google car has been by.  It's now a nice shade of blue with off-white trim.  Very classy.  Our apartment is the second floor place on the right, in case you feel like coming by and throwing stuff through our windows.  Hehehe...

While you're at it, take a little Google tour around the neighborhood.  Who knows?  You might decide you want to come on up and be our neighbor, too!