Apartment living

Some things have surprised me about our new apartment building. Other things have disappointed me.

One of the things that surprised me is the parking lot ramp. We have underground parking and there’s a very steep ramp down into it. When we first saw the building I was worried what that ramp would be like in the winter time. This couldn’t be tested until we first had snow. The day I stayed home a couple of weeks ago I discovered that the ramps were heated and therefore didn’t accumulate any snow or ice. This is a very good thing. Really, it makes sense that it’s designed this way because I can’t imagine how much of a pain it would be to try and go up and down an icy ramp.

The laundry facilities in this building are far better than the old building. They have a lot of washing machines and even more dryers (the other building had 8 of each). One key difference is that the dryers actually dry our clothes (what a concept!). Plus you can add 10 minutes of drying time at a time which is good when your towels are still a little damp but you don’t want to have a whole other hour of dryer time.

It’s not all milk and honey around the building though. There’s the security problem I mentioned on Friday. There isn’t much visitor parking out front. The stairwways are a little creepy.

Now we have to worry if our heat in the apartment will work or not. Yesterday morning the power to the whole building went out which on a day when you have -35C windchill is not a positive development. Marcy called Toronto Hydro and they didn’t even know about the problem. They fixed the problem but the apartment was still very cold. Fortunately during my last school term I had purchased a space heater. It wasn’t of much use to us then because the wiring in our house was so poor that we couldn’t have the heater running without blowing the breakers in the entire house. The heater was quite useful yesterday and last night though. It seems that the radiators in the apartment are on low or not on at all because I couldn’t feel much heat coming from them. The space heater is useful but only in one place at a time – it’s not like that one heater can heat our big apartment. We moved it into the bedroom last night and kept the door closed to trap the heat. It worked quite well but the rest of the apartment was pretty cold this morning. If the heat doesn’t come back on we’re going to have to press our superintendent and/or building manager to act quickly. I’m sure there are other people in the building with the same problem; I know that a family on our floor had to have their heaters repaired yesterday (they have horrendous luck with their apartment) and they can’t be the only ones. Having no heat in the winter time is a scary proposition.

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