Down and Out in Seattle. - The Boarding House.

The Boarding House.

My latest stint in alternative housing structures is a communal house run by a rental company.  I have named it "The Boarding House."  The house was built in 1919 in what appears to have been a Craftsman style with four bedrooms and one bath at 2,660 square feet.  When it was purchased by the rental company it then converted into eleven bedrooms with three baths.  (Apparently, it is still on city record as being a one-family four bedroom and one bath house.  I'm not sure if this is a problem.)  It is the on the border between the U-District and Wallingford.  Our back alley is the defining line.  I joke that this is because our communal situation is too trashy for Wallingford to accept us even though we are the first strip of houses west of the Interstate.

My room is the southern half of what was once the living room and has French door access to the front porch.  Since the conversion, there is now a distinct lack of a front door so from time to time I get to respond to knocks on my bedroom door for packages from confused delivery people even more confused as I tell them that this is my bedroom and I'll try to track down who they are looking for.

My initial plan with crossing back to the West Coast was to leave all my things in my parents' shed until I found a place with friends and then recollected my belongings.  As housing plans continually fell through I found this communal house as a means of escaping.  Escaping the continual crashing on couches, in attics, and the odd spare room of friends not seen for close to a decade, or friends of friends not seen in close to a decade.  Five months of homelessness showed me just how nice it is to have a network of friends and just how fragile that network can be.

One of the "rules of the house" put forth by the landlord was to not buy things from thrift stores for fear of bedbugs.  I did not nor do not follow this rule.

The upstairs Eastern bedroom and view.

The structure of the communal nature of the house puts the landlord as the mediator of any issues. Problems with things like dishes and noise complaints result in warnings and evictions.  Although this also pits us against one another as possible anonymous informers which can become muddier as the landlord does shady things.  One of the tenants, Ean, who moved in around the same time I did would butt heads with the landlord about the landlord's refusal to fix things.  He would drag his feet about problems or blame it on the other tenants.  (At one point most of the members of the house met to share problems that we had been having and it was a tongue-in-cheek joke that this was probably the landlord's worst nightmare.)  The landlord's way of dealing with Ean was to say that his rent was being raised by 18%, although when we sign our lease he says that he would never raise our rent as a means of helping it look attractive in the face of Seattle's constantly increasing housing market as well as the fact that he knows that there is a high turn around rate where he can increase the rent between tenants.  So, Ean left.  He was also one of the proponents of the house for people talking to one another.

The kitchen.  I like to use our mud/trash room as a double-skin
façade feature by opening or closing interior and exterior doors
to regulate the heating and cooling of the kitchen.

In a house comprised of eleven people having three bathrooms and one kitchen, there is a lot of buildup of subtle messes in the communal areas.  Once a week we have a "cleaning lady" come through and tidy things. She is to clean the counters, but not any dishes.  Any dishes found in the sink or counters when she comes through are placed into a garbage bag and placed on the back porch and after a week are then placed into the garbage.  A lot of communal items have gone missing in this fashion, or at least that is what I assume happened to them.  The only bread knife, the one pot that had a matching lid, the baking sheet...

For about the first 8-10 months of me living here, both of the basement bathrooms had problems with leaking plumbing involving the bath fixtures.  From time to time, the landlord's brother (a construction worker he tells us) would show up, tinker, draw on the wall with permanent marker where to turn the knob to turn off the water, and then leave saying that there is nothing that he can do because they don't make that plumbing part he needs any more.

The house is a smattering of single and double paned glass.  Last winter I had no heat in my room and compensated with thrift store blankets and a space heater.  Both of these things are unwanted by the landlord, yet my emails questioning why I don't have heat go unanswered.  When I would come across him doing another task in the house he would blame it on the person living in the room below me tightening a screw on the vent to my room unknowingly.

With the house being built in 1919 and being right next to I-5 I can only imagine the lead content that exists on every surface...