One year after buying our loft and moving in, I have made my peace with its various imperfections. I mean, I told myself that I never expected it to be perfect, but on hindsight, I must have had some degree of expectation, especially of something that came with a multi-thousand dollar, multi-decade debt.
After a few months of disappointment and something akin to buyer's remorse due to these imperfections, I woke from my stupor and recognized how I was letting a few flaws ruin what was (and is) an otherwise terrific home. In doing so, the noise from our upstairs neighbor dramatically decreased (or at least my awareness of it), and I barely give the busy street below our window much thought anymore. And after my bike was stolen from our secured garage, I have accepted it to be a hazard of living in an urban city and simply bought another one and keep it in the house.
I can't imagine living anywhere else, and I am proud of the home that Sam and I have made together. And in the spirit of my living gratefully for the year, I try not dwell on the small stuff. However, for argument's sake, if I had to think of one thing I'd change, it would be the temperature inside.
A selling point that the agent hammered into us repeatedly was the radiant heating mechanism under our floorboards. And I'm sure it will work spectacularly when we go to use it, but I could not say for sure since we have never had to fire it up. Our unit magically maintains a temperature about five or 10 degrees warmer than the weather outside, and given San Francisco's recent (and relative) heat wave for the last few days, our house has become something of a dry sauna in the late afternoons and evenings.
And this hits a particularly sensitive nerve with me because I have already lived, and hated living, in two dry saunas within the last decade. My first solitary apartment in college had huge west-facing windows. When I stayed in Davis for summer school one year, I never wanted to come home because I couldn't even sit still, much less study, without breaking into a sweat. I have never spent more time at libraries or coffee shops before or since.
Similarly, my hovel of an apartment in Oakland a few years ago was a 300-square foot oven that also faced the setting sun (I don't easily learn my lessons, apparently), but I could open the front door for a cross-breeze when necessary. Winter in this apartment, however, was a different story, one with drafty walls and a broken heater. That year, the Bay Area experienced one of the coldest winters in the history of cold, and I resorted to taking long, scalding showers and sleeping in a sweatshirt under three layers of blankets.
But I could tolerate it all because I was a poor, young renter. Now, I am still poor but arguably an adult, and I can no longer hop from apartment to apartment whenever the urge compels me, not with this noose-shaped mortgage around my neck. After three days of (again, relative) heat in the City, I couldn't help but appeal to the universe: Is it so much to ask that I have a comfortable, climate-controlled house to come home to?
This morning, as I coasted my bike out of our building and up 11th Street toward Market, I saw the first sign that the universe had indeed heard my plea. Floating just above the Bank of America clock tower in front of me were ghostly apparitions of fog. I could feel a moist, snappy chill in the air, and as I rounded onto Folsom downtown-bound, I saw swaths of mist tumbling gently over the buildings to my left. In other words, the heat wave is moving out.
I may not have air-conditioning in my house, but San Francisco had turned on its own, and though the day is beautiful out right now, warm and a good reminder that it is, after all, summer in California, I will likely have a pleasantly-temperatured house waiting for me this evening when the fog inevitably rolls back over Twin Peaks and onto the City below.
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