Friday, June 22, 2007

dear landlords

Please just give me a decent kitchen!!

Thanks,
Faycat

GRRRRRRRR.

J-Cat and I are starting to ramp up the apartment search now and my frustration grows as I see more and more craptacular kitchens. What is up with that?! Even in a really nice apartment you'll see a really bad kitchen. Do New Yorkers really just not cook at all? I don't need any fancy bells and whistles. All I need is well-maintained, full-sized appliances, some decent counter space, and some decent storage space. It doesn't have to be brand new, I don't really care what the cabinets are made of, I don't care if the set-up doesn't evoke the holy cooking work triangle, it just has to be there. None of these falling apart 24-inch ranges that can't even hold more than one pot at a time. Those are soup stoves. All you can do on those stoves is heat up a can of soup in a little 1-quart saucepan. It's not like these apartments are little teeny studios that don't have space to spare, like my little shoebox studio in the East Village where I could sit on the foot of my bed and cook on the stove. These are bigger places, there is room for 30-inch stove! Why why why?!

Yesterday J-Cat and I went to an Open House for a gorgeous 2 bdrm garden apartment in Park Slope. The landlord shows us the whole place, we freaking love everything (except the kitchen, which kinda sucked but was marginally workable, proving my point above), and after all of this tells us, oh by the way, someone already put a deposit down so it's no longer available. WTF?! Why the hell did he just show us this place, let us fall in love with it, only to shoot down our hopes? God I hate apartment hunting...

3 comments:

Leah said...

Ugh, I'm getting chills from my memories of apartment hunting. I don't think it's ever been fun for anyone, not even in the 1940s when there was no such thing as a hot commodity in Brooklyn...still, keep the faith. You WILL end up with something you like in the end. You know how people always say in a philosophical way that the process should be as important as the goal? This is definitely not true of apartment hunting. Did I mention I loathe realtors?

faycat said...

We're trying to avoid realtors just yet, but I don't doubt that if it starts getting down to the wire I'll get desperate enough and break down. So far the only one I've really communicated with was such a classic slimeball. And what's with all the cat hate? So many landlords don't allow cats. Do they not realize that my cat is the cleanest thing in my entire apartment?

Anonymous said...

Faycat,

Read your rant on Brooklynian as well. When are you moving? What's your budget? My husband and I are relocating and have two duplex apartments in our Fort Greene brownstone that we will be renting as of Sept.1. I totally agreed with your rant and as a fellow foodie... Well, email me at fortgreenerental@yahoo.com if you're interested.