The Defects, and The Delights

A plumber is coming by at 8 am tomorrow morning because the dishwasher doesn't work. For the first couple of weeks we'd been terribly environmentally unfriendly and ate all our meals off disposable dishes, so you can imagine our excitement when our proper plates and glasses and cutlery arrived. Poor S loaded up the dishwasher, only to find that it made a whirring noise for about thirty seconds before falling back into silence. He's been doing all the dishes by hand for the past few days as we've argued with our landlord, who swears the machine was working perfectly fine when she last used it and who appears to believe that we don't know how to use a dishwasher. (I'm pretty sure we do, and it will be extremely embarrassing if I'm wrong about that.)

At first I thought, Gee, this would never have happened at The Windermere. (That's our old building back in Washington.) I've been looking back extremely fondly on our old place and our old neighborhood. The management office was right there in the lobby if you had any issues come up, and there was a dedicated maintenance staff always around who were very friendly (to the extent that one custodian gave O a present shortly after he was born, and yes, I know it helped that I spoke Spanish), and there was always a doorman on duty in the evenings. Basically, you almost always saw someone in the building, and I liked that. It felt like a neighborhood within a neighborhood. But there are always pros and cons. We were living in a small apartment. The fact that it was laid out well with high ceilings and lots of natural light and hardwood floors made it feel bigger, plus we had two giant closets, but there's no denying the fact that we had an almost-2-year-old sleeping in a curtained-off nook adjacent to the main living space. Our kitchen was a narrow galley with only one drawer. And a small one at that. There was barely any counter space (we bought a separate piece of furniture for both counter and storage space), but there was a dishwasher! Oh, and laundry was all in the basement for roughly $3 a load. But that was actually kind of fun because O liked playing down there.

What's it like in Stockholm, you ask? Well, the things I love: the apartment is the biggest I've ever lived in. In addition to having two bedrooms (which, ok, I've lived in a 2BR), it has 1.5 baths! If you've never had that extra bathroom and you're sharing an apartment with someone, I can only hope for your good fortune in the future. There no longer exists a mad race for the single toilet after a long morning shopping trip out. (Presumably this will change when O learns about the potty, but I'm blocking out any and all considerations of this for the time being.) The ceilings are crazy high and the windows are proportionately tall and the wood floors are amazing. The kitchen is large enough to eat in (and there are SIX drawers!) and looks recently renovated with some pretty posh appliances. (Except for the broken dishwasher.) And there is a ton of storage. And a washing machine in the full bath!

BUT. There is no dryer in the full bath. There is no bath in the full bath. Heck, there isn't even what we Americans would call a proper shower in the full bath. There is a drain in the center, more or less, of the bathroom floor. There is no raised border or anything similar to delineate a shower stall. Just a curtain that's pretty short, so water gets everywhere. 

But back to the lack of a dryer. We don't have one in our unit. The laundry room is in the basement of a different building, across the courtyard, but they don't have dryers either. They have something that's translated as "oven room", which is basically a very warm place to hang up your clothes. Interesting, huh? Maybe it's just another example of how the Swedes are more environmentally aware. All of this means that I'm doing the laundry much more frequently than I used to, because there wouldn't be space to line dry everything if I waited longer. So, we have a modern kitchen and washing machine and both cable and Internet included in our rent, but I'm washing the clothes every other day and hanging them on the line like an Italian grandmother. In our case, we have never yet managed to have everything. ("Everything" would include a proper spare room and a second full bath and functional dishwasher, washing machine and dryer all in the unit.) We will make do with what we have for now. And quirks aside, it's pretty great. UPDATE: The water to the dishwasher had been turned off. Quite possibly by us by mistake. Ok, very possibly. I'm not sure we'll ever be fit to own our own home.