All the Small Things

There are many things I don't appreciate about our apartment. The screamy downstairs neighbors, the crazy upstairs neighbor, the howly next door neighbors; all loud in their own distinct ways at all times of the day and night. The derelicts that hang out in our "lobby" smoking weed and cigarettes, leaving behind garbage, graffiti and stink in their wake. The crappy basement dryers and leaky upstairs bathroom (also that crazy neighbor lady's fault), both ruining our nice wedding-gifted towels on a semi-weekly basis for awhile there. It's enough to make a person declare every other week that they want to move out. 

But after four years together—me and the apartment, that is—there are a few things that I do like about our space, and it's mostly in the details. When we began the search for our first home, Micky was totally sold when he saw the chalkboard wall in the kitchen. Once I assured him that we could do that ourselves anywhere we lived and that we had to look past the bells and whistles to see the real bones of the place, it was the old pre-war touches that really drew us—ok, me—in. The filagreed light switch in the bedroom, the portrait molding in the living room, the built-in ironing board in the kitchen that I have never set up for fear of unleashing a colony of live spiders and dead insect carcasses. This was the stuff that Brooklyn apartment dreams were made of!

Now that we've got another little person in the mix, with all of his bulky baby trappings, I'm definitely looking forward to finding someplace bigger with less baggage to live in soon. In the meantime though, I do admit that I will miss the features that made this place so special. With that I give you a photographic love letter to all the small things I love most.  

- Cathleen