Signed my name and initials at least 100 times yesterday and took possession of my new apartment around noon. We're still in a form of stasis, though, because my belongings won't arrive until later in the week, so we're spending the nights on the floor in sleeping bags while the cats wrestle and play around us.
My apartment has a cool dark color scheme—black appliances, dark countertops, beige walls that are quite a change from the standard-issue stark-white used in most apartments nowadays. But there's one thing I didn't know when I accepted the paperwork for this place:
The apartment is also ADA-accessible.
This means it has nice wide walking spaces—the entrance hallway, for example, is nearly 4' wide—but it also means odd trade-offs in storage spaces for a person like me who does not need the ADA features. For example, part of the kitchen is given over to a lower-height counter with open space beneath it to accommodate a wheelchair, so almost 1/3 of the available cabinet space below the counters is just gone, and there's only one full-width drawer in the kitchen (suitable for a silverware holder). The rest of the drawers are all these half-width or narrower numbers.
There's one thing I didn't know when I accepted the paperwork for this place:
This apartment is
ADA-accessibleAnd then there's the bathrooms. The master bathroom's counter ends a good 4' from the toilet. The toilets in both bathrooms are those taller-than-usual numbers to allow wheelchair-bound users to shift easily from chair to toilet and back without having to raise or lower themselves significantly. Both tubs have shower heads mounted on those raise-or-lower bars so a seated person could use the shower effectively, but for a standing person, the water streams are irritatingly low.
And one glaring ommission for a supposedly ADA-accessible apartment: The bathrooms have no grab bars. I guess maybe they install the bars if a renter requests them, but I'd expect them to be installed by default and have to be removed if a renter didn't need them.
All in all, these are features I don't need or want and are causing me a good deal of annoyance in the 24 hours or so I've been in the place. The trade-offs to storage space don't seem worth it, especially since I plan to live here for at least two years and/or until I own a house of my own.
So I must go to the apartment office when they open at noon and find out if all the ground-floor apartments are ADA-accessible, as the one leasing consultant (oh how I hate that title) told me back in November. If so, I'm gonna have to figure out exactly what to do—stay here, find something at another property? If not, I'll be asking them if there are any non-ADA apartments available right now so I can switch around and not be annoyed for the next few years.
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And how's your Sunday?