The Preparations Begin

After we announced the pregnancy, a few people asked whether we were going to move -- the thought being, of course, that New York City apartments are rarely large enough for the people who live in them, let alone +1.

Luckily, that hasn't been a concern for us. We chose a three-bedroom in a nice, middle-class (read: not trendy or extra-expensive) neighborhood when we moved to Brooklyn almost five years ago, and we stayed put. So we had our own bedroom, a spare bedroom with a twin bed for guests, and an extra room where we stored our desk, books, bookcases and whatever other odds and ends we collected.

Of course a baby upends our nice separation of spaces, but not necessarily for the worst. The reorganization of our apartment started this past weekend, with the Saturday delivery of our new rocker-recliner. To fit that in the living room, we had to move one of the other chairs out. The more comfortable of the two, we decided, would go into what will become the nursery (the former spare room).

And so after the delivery men left, we started in. We moved the bookcases against one wall in the third room and the desk against the other. Paul took apart the spare bed and carried each piece to the room at the front of the apartment, upending our entire space. The result: the new spare room is pleasantly crowded (and probably a lot quieter for our guests, since it faces the side street instead of the busy Fifth Avenue), and the old spare room/eventual nursery, is full of the baby stuff we've accumulated from my parents and Paul's sister.

The "nursery," however, is far from assembled. Paul's video game system and the small TV it's hooked to is still in there, waiting to be moved to the new spare room closer to the delivery date. And we still need a new dresser, let alone a place for the baby to actually sleep!

But things are slowly coming together. Next up: rearranging our own bedroom.

In New York for Half of Our Marriage

Paul and I have now lived in New York for more than half of our marriage.

It's a milestone for no one but me, but it seems like I should mark the occasion somehow. It's not quite worthy of a glass of wine or a piece of cake, so a short blog post will have to do.

I'm not sure which is harder to believe: that Paul and I have been married for more than eight years, or that we've lived in this Brooklyn apartment for more than four.

When we stowed away boxes of books, knick-knacks and who-knows-what-I-can't-remember in my parents' attic in preparation of downsizing from a bi-level house to a small apartment, we thought we'd be reopening their dusty covers in two years, tops.

Time flies, and I'm still having fun.

Home vs. Apartment: Cold Weather Edition

Sometimes I love living in an apartment. Earlier this fall was one of those times.

That's when water started seeping into the bathroom, just in front of the toilet where the wall meets the floor. FYI: That's not the part of apartment living that I love. Please continue.

After the bathroom rug got soaked once, I replaced it with sections of the newspaper to try to track where the water was coming from. For a few days the bathroom felt (and looked) a little like the bottom of a birdcage.

The water definitely wasn't coming from the ceiling, and the toilet didn't seem to be leaking either. We thought maybe it was caused by the sink or the dishwasher in the kitchen, on just the other side of the wall. However, sometimes the floor would be completely dry even after we washed the dishes.

We couldn't figure it out. But then, we didn't have to. We called our landlord, who called a plumber, and voila. Problem solved. (And if you're curious, it wasn't the toilet, sink or dishwasher causing it. It stemmed from a problem elsewhere in the building.)

But sometimes I definitely miss having a home of my own. More particularly, I miss having control of a thermostat.

In this apartment, we're at the whim of the landlord and the outside temperature -- he's programmed the heat to come on when it reaches a certain degree outside. I don't know what that degree is, but I do know it's too cold. And the heat's sporadic. Sometimes it'll kick on just before I get up in the morning, raising the indoor temperature to a lovely 73 degrees before I leave for work. But when I get home, it'll be 66 degrees, with no sign that the radiators have been on for a long time.

So there's pros and cons. I sometimes wish again for the control that homeownership provides, but it's nice not having to worry about repairs and home values, too. But then again, since we still own our house in central Ohio, it often seems we have the worst of both worlds.

Our 8 Days Without Heat

As the thermometer dipped, my anger peaked.

When we first asked our landlord to turn on the heat in our apartment, he thought it was already on. OK, I thought. An oversight.

A week later we reminded him again. That began 8 days of phone calls, text messages and the nearly non-stop use of our space heater.

At first we thought the heat just wasn't working in our apartment alone. Then the building's boiler blew up.

As our landlord and the plumbers worked to patch things up, our apartment hit a low of 59 and a high of 64 in rooms without the space heater. I'm not used to that. After all, during the last three winters our apartment was so hot we regularly had to open the windows.

I'm a wimp when it comes to cold weather. All week I changed into a hoodie as soon as I got home from work, and one night I even wore a hat for most of the night. I slipped on a wool coat if the cold got unbearable. During the worst of it, my space heater and I holed up in the bedroom, door shut.

The week progressed, and I got angrier. The glimmers of hope only made me madder. On Friday morning the radiators sputtered on at about 4:30 a.m., but were off by the time I got up at 8. On Saturday the same thing happened, only in the afternoon.

On Sunday -- day number 8 of the fiasco -- we were both fed up. Even Paul -- who had been taking the absence of heat pretty well -- was exasperated. He and our landlord exchanged 22 text messages and 2 phone calls. And our heat was officially and finally flipped on at 8 p.m.

As I type this blog post on a Monday night, it is a balmy 75 degrees in the living room, and I am happy. But I did learn something from the experience -- namely, how to tell the difference between 59 degrees and 63 degrees merely by standing in the middle of the room. It's a skill I hope I won't have to use anytime soon.

No Bar, No Crowds & a New Kind of Noise

Out with the old, in with the new. Only this time, I hope the new is a little quieter.

The bar/Mexican restaurant two floors below our apartment closed several months ago, and in the last couple of weeks the work has been fast and furious to turn it into a seafood restaurant. Hopefully not a bar/seafood restaurant, but I can't yet be sure.

The space sat empty the entire summer, and that made for some enjoyable, comparatively silent nights. There were no drunk couples breaking up under our bedroom window. The car that inevitably had to warm up its extremely loud engine at 4 a.m. at least a few times a month never made an appearance. We knew we wouldn't have to pay for warm and breezy summer days with loud and drunken crowds at night.

Lately we've had to deal with a new sort of noise: construction. The drilling (or welding, or something loud involving power tools) was so intense that it shook our bathroom floor when I was getting ready for work one day last week. But the work always stops before I get home in the evening, although the holes in the brick walls keep growing and growing.

I'm not sure when this new restaurant is scheduled to open, and I have yet to decide whether I'll give it a try. It might just depend on the behavior of their clients.

Our First Brinner Party

It's cold outside, but what's cozier than breakfast for dinner?

So went the thinking behind our recent "brinner party." And so about a dozen people crowded into our apartment for mimosas, Bloody Mary's, sausage souffle, a vegetable frittata, turkey hash, mini quiches, donuts and way too much more.

I enjoy having guests, but I can't remember a time since we moved to Brooklyn when we've had more than two at once. In fact, this was the first time we'd ever even used the folding chairs we dragged here from Ohio and have stored under the spare bed ever since.

Paul and I both had a terrific time, but I must admit that hosting a party here was much more difficult than throwing one in Columbus. This was almost exclusively because of the amount of space.

We had seats for everyone here, but just barely. In Ohio, we had space in the living room to spare, a deck and a backyard.

And the kitchen. At least one person commented on the spaciousness of our kitchen, but it sure doesn't feel that way when two people are cooking nonstop for eight hours.

And despite the more obvious joys of having company, there was a more unexpected one-- a clean apartment. It hasn't looked this nice since ... oh, wait. It's never looked this nice.

But We Still Have a Shovel Anyway

"I don't have a shovel; I have a landlord," I overheard a co-worker say on Friday. The Eastern seaboard was to be hit with a big snowstorm, and conversations inevitably turned to the weather.

The comment made me smile, and it also made me think. I haven't shoveled snow in almost three years. (And yes, I did shovel snow in Columbus. My wonderful husband would always be the one to shovel early in the morning before we left for work, but I would dig out his cozy Carhartt, two sizes too big for me, and shovel when I got home from work.)

The snow hadn't started when I went to bed Friday night, but there was an inch or two and counting when I awoke on Saturday. Even still, when I looked out our living room window, it appeared that our building's superintendent had already cleared the sidewalks. Sometimes apartment living isn't so bad at all.

And yet, we still do own a shovel. We store it in the car trunk, just in case we need to dig ourselves out. We haven't used it in -- you guessed it -- almost three years.

My Home for the Holidays

It's a blessing and a curse to be in New York City during the holidays.

On the one hand, the city is sparkling with lights and holiday markets. On the other hand, I'm 500 miles away from my family and most of my friends, and I don't have room for a Christmas tree.

For the third December in a row, I've stuffed the curio in the corner of the living room with all of our Christmas ornaments, and decorated the top with gold garland and a red ribbon. Before Paul carted them off to Ohio on Saturday, I nicely arranged the wrapped presents at the bottom just as if the cabinet were a fresh spruce.

Christmas ornaments in wine glasses and antique cups

The travel ornament shelf-- from red gate (Japan) to blue coaster (Milwaukee)

To go home for the holidays now, I have to take vacation days. This is something I never, ever had to do in Ohio. It was convenient if I took off a day or two around Christmas (especially if it was in the middle of the week and we planned to go to Defiance), but it wasn't absolutely necessary. I even worked one Thanksgiving morning and spent the rest of the day with Paul's family. No big deal.

Now -- especially this year, since I'm flying -- I'm much more weather dependent. I'm flying to Columbus on Christmas Eve and praying that this year's ration of flight delays was met with the hordes of stranded passengers during Saturday's snowstorm. Wish me luck.

What I Miss from My Daily Commute in Ohio

I didn't exactly enjoy my 50-minute commute to and from work each day in Ohio, but I did have it down to a science.

I left home at exactly 7:42 a.m. to get to my desk by 8:30. It was a long, boring drive (after I got out of our subdivision, the drive involved exactly two turns), but my radio routine helped to pass the long minutes.

In the morning I would listen to my favorite radio station and Columbus' lone alternative option, CD101. On the way home, I'd flip the channel to NPR for All Things Considered (or, if I got off a bit later, Marketplace).

I don't miss the drive, but I do miss the radio. Now I rarely listen in, and my knowledge of new music is nearly zilch. But what I really miss most is the ability to sing.

Don't get me wrong-- I am absolutely, positively a horrible singer. But in the privacy of my own car, no one knows that.

Even in our house in Galloway I would crank up my MP3s and belt out a few tunes when Paul wasn't around to get annoyed. In the close quarters of our current six-family apartment building, however, I am much too embarrassed. And besides, our downstairs neighbors are likely already annoyed enough at us since the cats tend to knock something heavy onto the floor at least twice a week.

In any case, my blooming career in music has been put on hold for the last two years-- to everyone's relief, I'm sure, except for me.

Kitchen Supplies: From Closet to Hole in the Ceiling

The hole in our kitchen ceiling earlier this year.

In Ohio I had a closet dedicated to kitchen supplies.

The spare room closet was filled not with clothes, but with a wok, bamboo steamer, and various pots and pans.

I don't have that luxury in New York. Heck, I don't even have a closet in our bedroom.

So the kitchen supplies go anywhere they fit. The cabinets are full-to-overflowing, and we store the colanders, saute pans, and even the wok and bamboo steamer in the space above the cabinets, a couple of feet below the ceiling. Luckily Paul and I are both tall.

In June you might remember my passing reference to a giant hole in the kitchen that appeared when Paul and I returned from a long weekend in Defiance. To make matters worse, the hole was stuffed with our frequently-used kitchen supplies.

Long story short, the landlord cut the hole because of some water issues in the apartment above us, blocked the hole with the kitchen stuff so our cats would stay away, and planned to fix it before we came back. Unfortunately, we came back a day earlier than he expected.

Obviously we (OK, Paul) washed the pots and pans before we (OK, still Paul) cooked with them again. But it wouldn't have happened if we still had our closet full of kitchen supplies. Or if the landlord had -- revelation of revelations -- a bag to cover the hole.

And if I still had the closet, I would definitely have a waffle maker by now. I do have a griddle dedicated only to pancakes and french toast, stuffed into a place of honor in the linen closet. But the waffle maker will have to wait.

All fixed, but still not painted.

To the Man Who Just Moved In

Dear Man Who Moved Into the Apartment Opposite the Kitchen at Work,

Congrats on your new place! And sorry for accidentally making eye contact with you when I was in the hallway at work. I'm pretty sure there's an unspoken rule against that. Anyway, it probably won't happen again. I noticed your blinds were installed by the end of the day.

I hope you're used to keeping the blinds shut in your bedroom. Otherwise your bed's in a really bad spot.

See, your windows face our office's busiest corridor-- the one that links the entrance to the kitchen to about half of the office. I walk down the hallway at least eight times a day, and I peek into your new place each and every time.

In the last few weeks my co-workers and I have watched as real estate agents gave tours of your apartment. And we all noticed when the floors got waxed; they're as shiny as a bald man's head. Looks like a nice place. Two, maybe three bedrooms? Hope you got a deal.

We'll probably be seeing more of each other, although hopefully not too much. Remember about those blinds.

Your neighbor,
Diane

Our 24-Hour Search for a New Apartment

On Sunday we viewed our first three apartments in our quest to find a new home.

Less than 24 hours later the search was over. We're staying put.

That's mostly because our landlord on Monday proposed reducing our rent $150 a month. It didn't take Paul and I long to realize it was an offer too good to refuse. I'm already deciding what plane tickets that extra $1,800 is going to buy next year.

But truth be told, our afternoon of apartment hunting was pretty discouraging.

The first apartment we looked at was in an excellent location, directly 80 blocks north of where we live now. Each of the two bedrooms, however, had room for only a bed. No dresser. No nightstand. Barely a pair of shoes.

The second and third apartments were in another building, only a block from a good subway station. But the views were just as ugly as the apartments themselves, and the kitchen counters didn't even have room for a microwave.

And the bathroom of the bigger apartment was tiny. I'm talking minuscule. The bathroom was triangular, and if you sat on the toilet you certainly would have to tilt your legs to the left in order not to touch the wall. If you stood in the center of the bathroom with both arms straight out, I'm positive you would always be touching a wall no matter what direction you faced.

We didn't expect to find a better apartment, and Paul and I both love our Bay Ridge place. The floors and appliances were all new when we moved in, we have more windows than we did even in our house in Ohio, and three bedrooms for two people is pretty luxurious by New York standards.

But while we like Bay Ridge, we don't love it. The work commute isn't so bad (it's actually 10 minutes shorter than my former commute from Galloway to Springfield), but waiting for the trains at night and on the weekends, when they don't come as often, gets to be a bore. Really, we just want to move our apartment to Park Slope, a neighborhood about four miles north with a younger crowd, good bars, and nice restaurants.

And while we've decided to stay put, the bar two floors below us has evidently decided the same thing. As you may recall, it was supposed to be evicted in two weeks, and that was six weeks ago.

Since then, there's been only one night that we considered filing a noise complaint. Surprisingly, it wasn't the night in which I assume it hosted a bachelorette party. How could I tell? The next morning the sidewalk outside my front door glittered with sparkly, multi-colored confetti-- all in the shape of tiny penises.

Bay Ridge: Keepin' it classy.

Should We Stay or Should We Go?

We have exactly one month to decide if we're moving.

The answer, more than likely, is no. But who knows what can happen in four weeks?

We came to New York with the understanding that we would stay two years and then re-evaluate. This is the end of the second year, and I'm not yet quite ready to leave. Every weekend feels like a vacation. There's always something new to see, some place new to try. Why leave until that feeling disappears?

And yet I couldn't help but check out some Columbus real estate sites a couple of weekends ago. We could have a Short North condo, steps from High Street, with a deck -- a deck! -- and probably spend less on housing than we are right now.

It's no secret that housing is expensive in New York. Our mortgage in Galloway was half our current rent, and we had twice the space, plus a two-car garage.

As for buying, anything remotely within our price range in New York is too far from the city to even consider. A one-bedroom in a nice part of Manhattan (and even the better Brooklyn neighborhoods) easily can run to $400,000+.

The other option, of course, is moving to another area of Brooklyn. I would like to be a little further north, closer to more subway lines and Manhattan. Apartment prices have dropped in New York as they have in much of the rest of the country, so it's possible that we could find a deal.

But overall I like Bay Ridge, our apartment, and my six-minute walk to the subway, so I'll be only halfheartedly searching for a new place. But a girl can dream ... and search Craigslist in the meantime.

Defiance to New York in 21 Unpublished Tweets

I don't use Twitter, and I don't update my Facebook status on the road. I won't be doing either until I get a cellphone that doesn't resemble two decks of cards chiseled together at one end.

The world's loss, I'm sure. Even so, it's difficult not to tweet in my head, and our Monday night trip from Defiance, Ohio, to Brooklyn, New York, was filled with plenty of observations -- in 140 characters or less, of course:

1. Next time in Defiance- Christmas. Next time in Ohio- September.

2. Sign between Toledo and Detroit: "Prison Area: Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers." Inspires a lot of confidence in the judicial system.

3. Billboard a few miles away: "Need credit? Credit stink? poopycredit.com" More like shitty sign.

4. I forgot how many country stations NW Ohio has. I miss CD101.

5. Gas is a nickel cheaper if you pay by cash rather than credit card. Is this common everywhere now?

6. Why do I insist on getting to the airport so early?

7. Last time I waited for the tram at DTW I threw up on the platform and then on the whole flight to NY. Good times.

8. Two gate changes and an hour delay. Huge surprise.

9. Love the window seat except when it's cloudy and all the city views are on the other side. Check, and check.

10. No thanks to the peanuts, but I'll take 10 packs of Biscoff cookies, please.

11. Landing at LGA right next to the water freaks me out.

12. The taxi line is so long that I watched a boy and girl meet, flirt and exchange numbers before piling into separate cabs. Awww.

13. If Paul started running right now, he would beat me home if I took public transit. Then again, he would prob be killed, so I would beat him.

14. Did I just hear the cabbie call another driver a bitch?

15. Taco Bell, brownies, orange juice and a bumpy BQE don't mix.

16. Nowhere I'd rather be than a 12:30 a.m. traffic jam, meter ticking.

17. Billboard in Brooklyn mentions "proctology" with one of the O's replaced by an image of an ass. The borough at its finest.

18. Good kitties-- no puke in the hallway like there usually is when we return after a long weekend away.

19. I don't remember that huge hole in the kitchen ceiling when we left Friday.

20. Paul killed some type of large insect he's never seen before. Probably came from the large hole that is IN THE CEILING.

21. Unpacked. Do I really have to be at work in 8 hours?

An Apology to Whoever Lives Below Us

I'm surprised our downstairs neighbors haven't yet used the handle of their broom on the ceiling.

We're always dropping things on the hardwood floor or dragging the coffee table a few inches this way or that. And if it's not us, it's the cats. I don't know how many times Will has knocked off the remote control.

I still haven't memorized the spots of the floor that squeak when I step on them. And I'm sometimes afraid I turn the TV on too loud.

A couple of nights ago I was even reading in bed and I hiccuped so violently that the book flew out of my hand, knocked into my mug of water on my nightstand and landed with a thump on the hardwood floor. At midnight.

I've never had to worry about this before. I lived in a couple of apartments in college, but c'mon, that was college. If a couch on fire in the middle of the street doesn't bother you, then I'm pretty sure heavy footsteps in the apartment above you won't bother you either.