I started renting a small office space in a large historic building downtown.
There’s a lot to love about this charmingly rustic atmosphere, between the old school elevators and the amazing view outside my window overlooking the river down below. Some of the furniture downstairs is decades old as well. But after you quit focusing on the superficial features you begin to realize how needlessly run down this place has become. Being inundated with a musty mold odor wherever you go in the building is the least of your worries. Sometimes the locks on the doors don’t actually engage at night when you’re leaving, which is a massive security risk. The plumbing constantly backs up, the lights go on and off because the wiring is so old, and there is a huge 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 someone would eventually fix these problems. But oddly enough, the nail in the coffin for me is the climate control inside. It doesn’t matter what the weather is like outdoors, the building ranges from extremely hot to extremely cold on a day by day 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 day. You could find the opposite happen in January, with air conditioning on and circulating throughout the whole building. And no matter what the temperatures are like, it’s always extremely humid inside.