Joanna Stich

We are standing in the hallway of our new building with 5 suitcases, 2 backpacks and a handbag in tow waiting for the current tenant to leave the apartment. He’s scrambling around trying to grab his last things, throwing stuff into bin bags as they’ve ran out of boxes and his wife is holding a large plant in her hands;  8 months pregnant ready to pop at any time. It’s not ideal, in fact it’s quite embarrassing to be hurrying someone out of their apartment, but I blame my landlord for it. He was itching to get out to his family on this beautiful Saturday Afternoon, first sunny day we’ve had in weeks.

Anyone that knows me knows what’s coming – disinfecting the apartment my favorite part of any move. There’s something to be said about being able to clean the apartment to your own standards when it’s still completely empty. We were so excited to finally be in our own little space, but as the day went on we kept on discovering more and more broken items around the apartment; things that should be in a perfectly fine working order. It was disheartening, as we later found out from the previous tenants (& our neighbors) that our landlord is lazy and given the state some of the furniture is in he’s also very cheap.

To this day I don’t know how we’ve overlooked it; I think we were desperate to get our own four walls and know we won’t be ‘homeless’ forever. As with every move, you tend to produce extra garbage be that empty boxes, packaging or in general throwing stuff out we didn’t want to keep; this meant we had to go down to the bins more than usual and apparently we were ‘banging’ our front door so much the neighbors windows were shaking. Let me tell you if he ever needs help he need not come knocking on our door, the old sod…. [Fast forward few weeks and turns out he gives out to absolutely everyone including my lazy landlord so we didn’t feel SO bad].

Our apartment is on the sixth floor overlooking the English Bay; it’s a great motivation when you see people jogging or walking on the beach for us to actually get out of the house. We have sun all day during the day and in the evening the sun hits of the water and its blinding us! It’s really magical, never thought I’d be living by the water; especially that I’d have to be a politician to afford house by the water in Ireland haha.

It’s a studio (or as Canadians call it A bachelor) apartment which means its one big room, open concept with a separate bathroom & kitchen. It was a right move to begin with thinking we were getting a bargain but turns out we are actually overpaying for it; but look we didn’t have beginners luck there. It’s only a three month lease, so we will be looking for a 1 bedroom apartment come 1^st of May, because if I get woken up by a Manchester United Match at 8.30am on a Sunday one more time, I think I’ll be filing for a divorce! #TimeDifferenceIsABitch

At the time of our move neither of us actually had a job, so the landlord accepting us without any sort of security of getting next months’ rent was very lucky. Plenty of places have requested work contracts etc. so in retrospect I think it worked for both of us even if it did turn out to be a complete dump.

Jo.