Posts Tagged ‘house’

Those of you who are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy will know that warmth, comes right at the bottom, on level one, along with food and shelter. It, therefore, seems quite odd to me that we don’t take it particularly seriously.

Take our apartment for example. It’s too warm in the summer (so much so that they felt the need to install an air conditioning unit) and too cold in the winter. So was my last apartment, and the house I lived in before that. In fact, here is me moaning about it in 2008. My parent’s house and student halls seem to be the only places that were ever capable of properly regulating temperature.

I was quite hopefully when we moved into a posh, very well furnished apartment in February, that we had finally found somewhere that was properly heated. It had a fancy system where you could set your temperature range and it would do the rest.

But, after months of fiddling with it, we don’t seem to be able to make it do what we want to do. How hard is it to maintain a constant temperature? It’s not like we moved into an old build, Nest was probably already around when they furnished the place.

Worse still, the very design of the building is just stupid. The radiator is right next to the bed, rather than below the window. This means when it is on, it blasts Elina’s head with heat the whole night while her feet, down the other end of the bed, are cold because of their proximity to the window. You have to go out of your way to design a system so badly.

Not to mention that all of this is on electric heating, so costs us three times as much as it should.

Roll on Gene Roddenberry’s glorious future, it might be socialist, but at least you will be able to set the temperature of your quarters.

I finally got to see Gijsbert’s new house yesterday. It’s very nice indeed! Located in Adel, the street could easily be confused for a JCT600 showroom with lines of Mercedes, BMWs and and Audis. Detached and everything.

It was quite a nice garden at the back too – you could even describe it as being very appropriate for humanist summer BBQs similar to those held by the North Yorkshire Humanist Group which I attended last summer.

It occured to me as I filled my basket with a mere 3 items at Co-op yesterday to and then pulled out by extra big credit limit credit card to fund the purchase that I am back in suburbia.

Having spent the last 3 years living in student accommodation it feels strange to be back in, for lack of a better term, “real” house. I mean, I have an oven! A working oven! That’s so good. It’s taken until now for me to really discover a way of heating food beyond microwaving it.

And a shower. A proper shower that doesn’t just trickle out a bit of water if you give it 5 minutes. It doesn’t actually output hot water but at least it outputs mildly warm water with a decent force.

Still, I’m not convinced the trade off is worth it. I watched TV the other day. For most of us, we simply stopped watching TV while we are at university. Unless they had TV on at the pub. Now we’re back to watching TV in our own homes. It’s all very depressing.

Not to mention the fact that all the pubs and takeaways are closing at like 11 in the evening.

Finally the distance is starting to bite. Due to so many of us being graduates, nobody other than myself has rushed out to buy a car and start boy racering it around (well, you’re missing out, having a car is suberb) so whenever we’re planning events it’s a case of, “well, how is everyone going to get here?” That’s not to say there aren’t good public transport links because there are – but it’s not quite the same as just living 15 minutes walk from each other.

If there is a moral to be gathered here it is that everyone should buy a car and then we can all go dogging on Thursday nights. Trust me, it feels less weird every time you do it ;). The other problem though is that we are off to Wendy tomorrow – but how? I mean seriously, we all want to drink because opportunities are limited these days but that means arranging some kind of travel. Not just walking down the road. And if we want to leave at different times, what then?

Not to mention the bitching that is going on about parking on the street. Silly little unimportant problems that seem to mean the world – welcome back to suburbia. Still, guess my email address makes more sense now :D.