The First Floor

The front door opens into an entry corridor.  Signs of sloppy work are immediately apparent.  There are painting smudges and scratches everywhere.  The first closet you come to houses a stacked washer and dryer unit.  I am fortunate in that mine have worked very well and I am thankful for their continued functionality.  Others have been less fortunate and their laundry has had to be outsourced to the Kaust laundry service, often indefinitely, while waiting for repairs or replacement.  Incidentally, repairs are made extremely difficult by the extremely close quarters of the closet, according to at least one maintenance worker.

Just beyond the washer/dryer closet is a half bathroom which I can't say much about because I rarely use it.  It works fine but does not offer the most inviting atmosphere.  There are bits of cement speckled on the wall tiles and an inch long brown smudge on the toilet seat which cannot be removed.  When I first saw this smudge my eyes opened to twice their normal size with disbelief.  Surely that's not what I think it is.  Thankfully, no.  Upon closer inspection I was relieved to find that it was only an errant dash of the sticky lacquer that covers most of the decorative wood surfaces in my apartment.  The air in this bathroom also has a thin piercing quality that makes me think of paint thinner and recently split stone.

Always enjoy explaining this one to guests.

Which brings us to the kitchen.  As always, it looks nice enough...

This is a kitchen.

...and it seems like they meant well.  When I moved in there were dishes galore, a ton of pots, and even some random food, but not nearly enough cabinet space to store it.  In the beginning I tried keeping some of my groceries on the counter, however this turned out to be quite foolish.  Besides taking up the limited counter space, I was losing bread.  Each night that I left bread on the counter, a corner of it would be gone by morning.  This, I discovered, was courtesy of the rats who had established a network of pathways through the kitchen via the holes left by the carpenters who failed to shore up gaps between adjoining surfaces.

The refrigerator and freezer doors also did not close properly.  This led to extensive condensation in both compartments, and the freezer became one big solid cube of ice.  This has since been fixed, as have some problems with the air conditioner over head that caused it to rain for several days on the kitchen floor.  But having maintenance done has always come with a price.  There's always collateral damage.  Because of the maintenance work and "cleaning" done in the kitchen, the oven tops are now rusted over and the glass oven door is etched with blasted sediment.  I have also lost a number of kitchen items in the wake of maintenance crews including dishes, a block of knives, and a bag of chips.

Silver Lining: a drawer organizer I made from boxes.

The last major area of the first floor is the living room, which isn't really an appropriate name because I don't live in it at all.  The center of the floor is covered by a carpet which produces a herd of fibrous pills any time someone walks across it.  One corner of this carpet is dusted with mysterious black flakes that issue from the nearby air conditioning vents.  Encircling the carpet are a couch and two chairs which are extremely firm as well as a massive TV sitting on a coffee table.  The coffee table is meant to sit in the center of the room.  The TV is meant to sit on a nonexistent entertainment center.  At this point, I have stopped asking about the entertainment center.

This is a living room.

As a side note the TV, while impressively large, is not useful.  Kaust provides TV service to its residents via a box that has never worked well.  It loads at a glacial pace and it freezes when the TV has been on for an hour or so.  But even this is irrelevant now because a couple months ago Kaust announced that it would begin charging for a majority of the TV channels.  By 'majority', I mean everything remotely entertaining.  So I can either pay for a low quality service or do without TV.  Needless to say, I did not subscribe.

This concludes Disk One of the Mark Houston Reality Tour.  Please scroll up to insert Disk Two and continue on to the second floor.