Apartment fix-up tips

(Photo credit: Miriam Clithero; Cheap Chic, an Allston store selling cheap furniture for students)

Published Sept. 15, 2005

This was one of 3 pieces I produced for the same deadline; I wrote everything in our section for our second issue. This was one I had been working on during the summer as I moved into an apartment which was to become, despite all my best intentions and careful research, a death trap that I only recently escaped. I should have simply written in bold letters:

Do not live in a city apartment where the plants are dying: this means that your habitat is likely as inhospitable to humans. Go instead to a neighborhood where trees grow without help of personal gardener, and you will likely flourish there as well.

But as students often, due to financial reasons, bloom where they're planted, this is a good guide to making a 10 X 10 space seem a little more like home.

Lead paragraph:

As the door to your new apartment or dorm room swings open, you survey a common scene: dirty carpets, pockmarked uninspiring white walls, paint-spackled hardwood and that ugly stepchild of all housing surfaces - the dreaded linoleum floor. If you are lucky enough to have windows, they're coated in grime that dates back to the Civil War; if you have lights that work, they are most likely the romantic fluorescent variety that makes you shudder when you flip the switch. But worse than all this is the blankness of it all.