I began renting a small office area in a big historic building downtown.
There’s a lot to love about this beautifully rustic atmosphere, between the outdated college elevators and the amazing view outside my window overlooking the river down below.
A fair amount of the furniture downstairs is decades outdated as well. But after you quit focusing on the superficial features you begin to realize how needlessly run down this locale has become. Being inundated with a musty mold smell wherever you go in the building is the least of your concerns. Occasionally the locks on the doors don’t really engage at evening when you’re leaving, which is a big security risk. The plumbing constantly backs up, the lights go on and off because the wiring is so old, and there is a sizable ant problem even if you never bring food into the building. Even with all of these problems on a repeat basis, I still stayed in my office and was foolishly resolute that a person could eventually fix these problems. But oddly enough, the nail in the coffin for myself and others is the temperature control inside. It doesn’t matter what the weather is similar to outdoors, the building ranges from harshly hot to harshly chilly on an afternoon by afternoon basis. I once walked into the building on a random July afternoon to find that someone had turned on the heat. My weather thermometer said the interior was 95 degrees that afternoon. You could find the opposite happen in January, with a/c on and circulating throughout the whole building. And no matter what the rapidly changing temperatures are like, it’s often humid inside.