First, you walk down that black asphalt path, with short-trimmed grass on either side. The HOA makes everyone keep it like that, no matter how sickly it makes it look. A strict line of long-stemmed yellow flowers hugs the perimeter of the house, contrasting nicely with the freshly power washed brick exterior. Not as elaborate as some of the other house’s gardens, but I think it goes really well with the vibe of the lot.
You probably noticed this is one of the smaller houses on the street, but it’s by far the best maintained. We rent it from this Puerto Rican couple who take the curb appeal so seriously that when my roommate tried to start a vegetable garden, they made her cover it up because the patch of dirt threw off the symmetry of the front entrance.
It’s a strange little house, but the layout works for us.
Once you come all the way up the blacktop walkway and get to the concrete steps, you can just start to make out our stove through the semicircle window on the front door.
Thanks to the placement of the stove in relation to the window, I can always see if my roommate is cooking something. If she’s cooking in a frying pan, I know she’s not expecting anyone. If she’s cooking in a sauce pot, I know she’s either expecting a man, or her sisters. Either way I know I’ll be hiding out in my room all night trying to air out the smell of Indonesian food.
Once you push open the door (don’t worry, it’s normal for it to take a couple tries, use your shoulder) you’ll be in a narrow corridor that opens into our semi-spacious living/dining room.
You can’t miss the artisan shoe rack my roommate bought before she even had money to buy a mattress that didn’t have to be inflated. Please use it, or she will throw you out. No, I’m not kidding. And then we’ll have to vacuum every room, even the rooms you weren’t in. So just put your shoes on the rack.
Perfect, so that clears up pretty much the only house rule (for guess at least.)
Step over the faux-Persian rug at the end of this hall and you’re in our living/dining room. The kitchen is kind of depressing to look at, but my roommate makes magic in that sad little rectangle. Sometimes I wish there was a door, but if the door were ever shut, there wouldn’t be enough space to move around.
You know what, let’s just get the kitchen out of the way since it’s the lowest point of the tour. Right this way, just keep going straight, perfect. So here we are. The solid white tiles with the little grey flecks remind me a lot of my school cafeteria’s floor which might contribute to my distaste for this room. You can go in front of me, we won’t both fit in here.
Fun fact, when we moved in, the two countertops facing out towards the living room weren’t here. This was all shelf space. But then there was only the one counter next to the stove and we kept having near misses with pot handles. We had to fight tooth and nail to get permission to install these, I don’t think the landlady appreciated our challenging her interior decorating sense. She finally agreed to let us take the shelving out if we paid her husband to install the counters. A little sketchy, I know, but he was actually cheaper than anyone else we looked at, and the counters work fine.
I’m not thrilled with this beige on brown look, but hey, they have a lot of drawers, so I just like to think functionality won out.
Watch your head on those hanging baskets. They’re actually just strips of mesh we bought from a fabric store and stapled to the ceiling. I can’t believe they’ve held up so long. You can probably tell the one with the apples and bananas is mine. The ones with unidentified root vegetables and stuff are my roommate’s. This first one is cassava. Underneath that scratchy brown stuff there’s this starchy white flesh. My roommate eats the entire hanging bag’s worth every month. Cassava would definitely be her desert island pick.
This middle one is just different kinds of rice, which she swears are all unique and serve different purposes that are not interchangeable, but between you and me I think they all taste the same.
Oh! Ok, this is the fun one. So these three vegetables find their way into just about everything she makes. The long prickly squash is called oyong, she doesn’t know an English term for it. It tastes like an okra and zucchini hybrid. These football shaped pale green buddies are called calabash. It’s pretty mellow. The feather lettuce is actually called dragon bean. She says if you eat it raw it’ll kill you, so, watch out for that one. I’m too scared to eat it cooked even. And the garlic is just garlic.
Stacking the toaster on top of the microwave was her idea. We definitely wouldn’t have had space for both, she eats toast every day, and I need a microwave for survival, so this was a good compromise.
There isn’t really a story to the fridge magnets. One is the Indonesian flag and the other is a running grocery list. Nothing exciting.
Alright, so the living/dining room is potentially our landlady’s greatest achievement.
This space is actually smaller than our entire bedroom yet there’s this nice blue couch we bought at an estate sale. It fits both of us and the dog. There’s the TV which , while small, can get really loud. And before you even say it, yes, it was my roommate’s idea to stack the tv on a shelf so we could keep books.
The dining room table and chairs were already here and when we moved in — the landlords basically said “we own this table and have nowhere to store it, so it’s staying here.” But that was fine with us. It’s nice to have a separate space to eat and study than right in the living room.
Plus, I can’t count the heavy objects I’ve dropped on this table, and still no dents. Whatever it’s made out of is solid stuff.
All those paintings of flowers are my roommate’s. She’s a great embroiderer too, but she refuses to hang any finished pieces because she thinks they look tacky. You can tell my family photos from hers because, well, they’re the ones without Indonesian people in them. And, yes, the framed Bible verses are mine, don’t judge. It’s mostly to keep my mom happy. She has a key and I never know when she’s going to decide to drop by.
We should really throw these flowers out, they’re starting to smell. They don’t look dead, but they smell dead. These side windows don’t open all the way, so if we get dead flower smell in here, we’re stuck with it for at least a week.
Oh, sorry I should’ve mentioned, that little door across the hall is the bathroom if you need one. Just, knock first, because it’s the only bathroom so it has the shower and everything. We have more magazines in there than underneath the tv. That other door, the one that looks too thin to walk through, is kind of an illusion. It’s not really a room, it’s a pantry.
So once we head up the stairs, you see the clever dividing plan my roommate dreamed up. It’s basically just a series of freestanding shower bars, but these curtains really do function like a wall. They don’t block sound, but they block light.
I don’t know who designed this house to have everything on the first floor then a weird little bedroom shoved into a second floor like an afterthought. It’s too separate to be a loft but doesn’t have enough to really call the second floor.
Right hand side is me, lefthand is her. I know this treadmill is kind of the elephant in the room, especially wedged between these two curtains, but I’m a personal trainer and I just had to have some equipment in the house. It can get logistically complicated. Like, if I’m running and she wants to come out of her room, I’ve got to stop the machine so she can step on it to get downstairs.
Ok. Let me just pull back both curtains so you can see everything.
Our bedspreads say a lot about our personality. Her sensible, temperature controlled beige plaid blanket made total sense for her. She likes things organized and practical. I picked this frilly leafy green one, and while I have to wear a sweatshirt to sleep in the winter, I love looking at this thing. I think this year I’m just going to suck it up and get a heavier blanket to use over it. Oh, feel the rug right by the bed, it’s so soft.
It was originally a bathmat, but I liked the texture so much I use it as a bed carpet.
I’ve had that blue bunny since I was 6, but the teddy bear I didn’t get until high school. That one’s a long story for another day.
I’ve got a rack of weights pushed up at the end of the room, and they’re worth every inch of space they take up. I’ve been using these suitcases as a modular dresser, but as you can see, my roommate has plenty of space for a dresser. Not that she cares.
This aisle between the bed and the weights is where I put my yoga mat when I make my YouTube videos, recognize the poster that’s always in the background? I don’t even really like that band, I just loved the album cover art.
My side is usually the emptier one. I feel like the less stuff I have out, the cleaner it is, the bigger it feels. She’s the opposite, she feels like the more stuff she’s got spread around the more she’s taking advantage of the space.
She’s a freelance programmer, and that computer is the most expensive thing in this house by far. More than the car out front.
Her art supplies double as her decor. She can’t stand trinkets or desk toys because she thinks they don’t serve a purpose. Ten mason jars of perfectly sharpened colored pencils, one for each color of the rainbow plus one for black, one for white, grey, and silver, and one for brown. Every time she uses a pencil, she immediately sharpens it into a perfect point again before returning it to the mason jar.
She’s got paint pens stashed behind the jars, her last roommate always used them up so she got into the habit of keeping them back there. That way if her jars are disturbed she knows someone’s been messing with them. I can’t draw to save my life, so she’s really wasting her breath hiding art supplies from me.
She keeps her clothes in these clear plastic drawers stashed underneath her bed. I’d show you but I don’t want to mess up her covers, she’s sensitive about that. They’re basically like the kind of drawers you’d find in a school supply closet.
That speaker may look small but damn it gets loud. Especially when she gets in her feelings and starts playing gamelan. I can’t even tune that stuff out with headphones on.
The dog likes it though, and it never likes any of my music. Why did we get a dog when the place was already so... cozy? We didn’t really have a choice.
We were at the park one day passing by this adoptathon for pets and it was just finishing up and this one sad dog was the only one who wasn’t adopted. We didn’t even ask any questions about her, we just adopted her there and then. Thankfully she was housetrained.
We’re pretty sure it’s because she didn’t go up to potential adopters so people thought she was standoffish, but really she’s just arthritic. We’ve got her on supplements now and she’s doing so much better. But we still keep her bed downstairs, because you never know what kind of day she’ll be having. She usually only ventures up here if she thinks we’re eating food.
I think her name had something to do with it too. Octavia is a weird name for a dog. It’s not comforting. The first thing we did when we brought her home was change it.
Oh, it’s funny you ask, we thought she was a mutt at first but we just found out she’s a Brittany. They’re usually medium sized but of course we get, like, the biggest Brittany ever created.
So, where I have weights and where a normal person would have a dresser, my roommate’s got this collapsible easel she paints her flowers on. Sometimes she takes it to the park but things have been so busy this summer. And then yah, that’s all computer stuff, it’s really sci-fi to look at but I can’t open it. She keeps it all locked in this titanium locker thing so if we’re robbed they won’t get taken. That stuff is her livelihood. If we’re gone for more than a day somewhere she even locks her desktop in there as well.
So, yah, that’s pretty much it. I’m so glad I got to show you. Thanks for sticking with me through the whole house. It’s small but it’s got a lot going on! And you should see it on Nyepi, that’s this Indonesian holiday, to this day I’m still not sure exactly what it’s for. But she takes it really seriously, decorating and cleaning and stuff.
Anyways, let’s head downstairs and I’ll take you around the rest of the neighborhood. There’s a cute little park, there’s a cool coffee shop if you want something to drink, there’s a hair salon that also sells flautas that are great. But the guy who sells them doesn’t keep regular hours so we’ll just have to try our luck. You can’t really walk anywhere else interesting from here but the bus stop right at the end of the street where you turned to get that spot goes to pretty much anywhere in the suburbs and right into the middle of the city.
Let’s head down, we’ll figure it out as we go.
Man, I really wish I could’ve shown you her computers. There’s a spare key behind one of these paintings, but, eh, you can imagine what it looks like, right?
Submitted August 19, 2019 at 02:17PM by Nightingale_Effect https://ift.tt/2Hg1anD
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