The boyfriend is a little slow.
Not lick the windows, short bus slow, but slow in the sense that it sometimes takes him forever to see the bleeding obvious. So, after living here for nine months, it has occurred to him that this condo is too small. I could have told him that the first day I walked in here, but this isn't about me.
And really, it is. The kitchen is about the same size as one you'd find on an RV. To get to the downstairs bathroom you have to turn sideways and shimmy past the washer and dryer. We have a dining room table we've never used here because there isn't enough space to pull out the chairs and sit at it. And then there are the closets, or lack thereof. The "master" closet can barely fit a laundry hamper. Which has led to another unfortunate situation... the "sunroom".
We chose this particular unit as opposed to other similarly doll-house sized units because it had a small enclosed patio off of the living room that we wistfully dubbed the "sunroom". It eats up half of the space of the tiny backyard, which isn't such a loss because three other units look down on it and any time spent outside makes you feel as if you're in an prison exercise yard. Plus, this time of year, with the sun low in the sky and blocked by the hills, the back yard receives exactly zero sun and after last week's rains, it's turned into a mold factory.
We imagined that the sunroom would give us a little more elbow room and allow us to hang onto more of our furniture. What it has turned into is what this unit is sorely lacking... a walk-in closet. Did I mention that it is technically outside?
It started with the boyfriend throwing up the ironing board since that was the only space in the house large enough to extend it. With the ironing board there, the laundry soon followed and now it's a forest of clothes with shirts and slacks hanging off all the beams. Absolutely all our clothes are now down there forming a hanging gauntlet you have to navigate to get to the garage or yard. And then last week we unfortunately discovered... the roof leaks. Badly.
So that seems to have been the final straw for the boyfriend. Our lease here runs until the end of February and we've made the decision to move on to something more spacious. Which brings up the perennial problem... money.
If our exile in Hooterville accomplished anything, it was to mask the severity of our drastically diminished circumstances. Housing costs there were so low we were able to live substantially as we had before, paying $900 for a three bedroom house. Our hovel here in Tinytown costs more than twice as much, and someplace larger will no doubt cost substantially more.
So the time has come to make some hard choices.
I wonder what a kidney goes for these days?
