The entire living space (minus the bathroom, because I don't count bathrooms as a place you can "live") is 180 square feet. For those of you, like myself, with no concept of space, that's 12x15 feet. About the size of your average dorm room.
I was watching HGTV last week and saw a new show about apartment hunting. The agent was referring to small, one room apartments as "bachelors" instead of "studios", so that is what I am calling my place. My bachelor sized apartment. See what I did there? I turned something cramped and inconvenient into something extremely trendy. Thank you, Home and Garden Television.
This photo does not do justice to how small the apartment really is, but please imagine that this is about half of the one room. The kitchen area is about 6x12 feet. Countertops? What you see is what there is. Also, I am sure you've noticed that the refrigerator looks un-level. That's because it is. The whole place is.
Perhaps the most interesting part about the apartment is the bed. At first look, it would appear to the naked eye that I have no bed. Do not be fooled, as the large doors that line one side of the room contain a....
MURPHY BED!
Oh yes, they do exist outside of sitcoms about broke waitresses struggling with two jobs, trying to get by and maintain their independent lifestyle...oh, oh God.
But back to the bed. I don't understand how it works exactly. There are lots of hinges, springs and dangerous looking metal parts. By pulling on the foot board, the whole thing folds out (with a rather satisfying bang) and drops down, sheets, pillows, stuffed animals and all. It takes up the entire room. There is barely enough space to walk around when the bed is folded out, so it has to be packed away every morning. There is also a "Murphy" table and benches that fold out of another cabinet in the wall. Yes, I live inside a pop-up book.
The best part about moving into this minuscule space is that I have absolutely no desire to go shopping. I can't, I don't have an inch of space to put anything else. The 2nd best part is that I don't ever, ever have to host another house guest - because unless we are going to keep the bed folded up and cover the floor in air mattresses, there is absolutely no space to add another person. Which is exactly how I like it.
The downsides, I suppose, would be that I certainly cannot entertain (I don't have a functional table, and the bookcase is actually in front of the folding one), and that I had to get rid of almost half of my belongings. That includes:
- a dresser I swiped from my college apartment (it was there when I moved in!) and have painted 3 different times to match different apartments over the last 4 years,
- 4 bar stools that I absolutely loved (the old place had a bar),
- a shoe rack (and, subsequently, about half of my pairs of shoes, since I no longer had a place for them)
- a reasonably sized television (see photo. I built the shelf that the TV is on, and the screen is probably about 18". If the room was any bigger, I wouldn't be able to see the picture),
- my box spring (the ol' Murph only takes a mattress on top of the cracked plywood and spring base),
- piles, piles, and more piles of junk I always thought I'd need again some day. Oh yes, this means that the red Tu-Tu left over from a beer fairy Halloween costume 3 years ago went to the Salvation Army, along with old quilt fabric, many rolls of wrapping paper, t-shirts I haven't worn in 5 years, and about 1/4 of my famous baseball cap collection.
I'm sure I will thank myself for this one day.
This tiny living thing has started to teach me a lot. For instance, you can't just leave your clean laundry in the basket until it's time to do more laundry and then just dump the clean on your bed...if you don't have a bed. And if you allow mail, change, shoes or dishes to pile up, it is immediately noticeable. I have to be really tidy in this space, or it gets out of hand VERY quickly.
I can't buy too many groceries. BJ's Wholesale Club? Forget it. If I purchase more than one box of pasta at a time, I have to rearrange the entire cupboard to make space.
Getting drunk in this apartment is actually really dangerous. Any clumsy or wide turns, and things are falling off shelves and the wall. When the bed is folded out, the doors nearly block the hallway to the point that I can barely get by, so if I am even the least bit out of sorts, I crash into it. I'm pretty sure the woman below me already hates me.
SO. Why do this, you ask? Why mortgage the space upstairs (which was no huge digs either, I should add. The only difference was one small room, but it felt like a lot more) for living in a glorified walk-in closet?
Besides the price, which is exactly HALF of what I was paying for rent upstairs (and that was a total steal), I have convinced myself that this is all I need. The only bill that is not included is my electric, which I paid last week at the whopping price of $16.43. Of course it's cheap, the whole place has only two light switches. And I can simplify my life by necessity (what 26 year old needs 4 bar stools?), which is very handy for someone who has just a touch of "hoarding" in their blood.
Also, as noble and trendy as I am trying to make this "Bachelor" apartment thing seem, I would be deceiving you of my real motives if I did not point out that my rent is now just slightly less than my student loan payment...
