A Farewell to #22E

Our first home:

The Centre Apartments

Corner of 5th and Bagby- Waco, TX

Unit 22E

It is bittersweet to be leaving our first home together and expecially to be leaving Waco. Both have treated us so well. Before we make the big move, I want to reminisce about this place so I can always remember it.

This apartment had the huge advantage of being 2 blocks from campus and was as safe as possible in Waco. It was also super cheap since the management agreed to rent it to us at half price to meet our budget. And although we absolutely LOVE our apartment, that is where the advantages end. This apartment complex is OLD. It does have central A/C but it is so inefficient (i.e. costs a lot to run but doesn't cool the place down at all) that we have only used it for a handful of days since last summer. We've just gradually trained our bodies to thrive in the 75-80 degree temperature range during the day and rely on the window unit in our bedroom to keep it cool enough to sleep well at night. The result? $50/month electricity bills. Totally worth it. Except that it is in the 90s today (outside) and it's so hot in here that I'm sweating bullets as I type this.

Although there are a lot of cosmetic things that are less than desirable about this place, like dingy caulk in the bathrooms, cream cabinets with 70s-style wood trim, and ivy wallpaper in the guest bathroom (we painted over the other awful wallpapers but the ivy was the lesser of the evils so we left it), the tiny kitchen is the only thing that really bothers me. It is a whopping 3 feet wide and half of one of the walls is taken up by a closet for the hot-water heater. There are very few cabinets and a miniscule amount of counter space. So the majority of our nice kitchen stuff that we got for our wedding is still in boxes in a closet upstairs. We've made it work, though, and it'll just be that much sweeter to move to a place with a normal-sized kitchen.

....

I may not have shrunk Kolby's favorite shirt in the wash or served any burnt dinners, but my first year of domestic life was not without its casualties. See if you can guess what happened to this stove burner: If you guessed, "It looks like you ran out of counter space and had to set a package of tortillas on the stove for safekeeping and then accidentally turned on the burner under the tortillas rather than the one under the pot of water like you meant to"--- then you were right. Even after several attempts to scrape the melted plastic off, the nutritional information of tortillas can still be read straight off that burner. Oh well.

Kolby had his own mishap, though... lest we forget the time he inadvertantly trapped Maya in the bathroom. See if you can guess what sequece of events happened in these two pictures:

If you guessed, "It looks like he unsuccessfully tried to pry the doorknob off with a flathead screwdriver and then decided to drill a hole through the door with a brand new electric drill that he only let charge for about 30 seconds before deeming it ready for the job"--- then you were right again!
....

Last week I used my camera to take a video that tours our apartment. I did this so that we'd always have it to remember what this place looked like, but I figured I'd upload it here so the friends and family that weren't able to make it down here to visit us could see it. It's as boring as would be expected, so feel free to skip it.

***Sorry for the poor upload quality and even poorer narration!***

Farewell, #22E!