This post is directly inspired by Dawn’s post on her blog.
I graduated high school in 1985 and went into the Army which housed me during my four year stint. Only once did I flirt with the idea of getting an apartment with a couple of friends to live off base, but it never got past the idea stage.
Getting out of the Army in July of 1989 I moved in with my high school best friend and his girlfriend in a house that was on the north edge of First Hill, just south of Capitol Hill. Alright, so it was a house and not an apartment, but you get the idea. This wasn’t the best neighborhood at the time. We could hear gunfire sometimes. The house was alright, and we lived across the street from the house where lived a man who would become the guitarist I would form a band with.
In December of 1989 I moved out to my first actual apartment, living completely on my own and by myself for the first time. It was a one bedroom apartment in an old brick building just off Broadway on Capitol Hill. At one point my best friend from the Army moved to Seattle and crashed on my couch while he searched for a job and apartment. At another point I had 3 roommates, which is probably a story that deserves its own blog post. This was a great place, and the building is now gone making way for the upcoming light rail station that should be coming any decade now.
Some time in 1991 I couldn’t afford to live on my own, those roommates all having long gone (thankfully). I moved into an apartment with the bass player in my band. It was a 2 bedroom affair just a few blocks up the hill from the previous place. It wasn’t a bad place, and I lived there about a year and a half before I couldn’t afford the rent.
Rock bottom. This next place was the worst place I ever lived. After two good apartments I wound up living in a rooming house in the University District. It was a generic house subdivided into 10 separate rooms and a shared kitchen. It was horrible and the less said about it the better. So many things went wrong in my life but I wound up meeting the woman who would be my wife while I lived here, so I can’t wish it away.
Back to Capitol Hill. We moved in together, though she would be in China for much of the time. This was a nice apartment just off Broadway on Capitol Hill, almost in view of my previous one bedroom apartment a couple of years earlier. I don’t remember exactly why we moved out of here – I think the rent went up to a ridiculous amount.
The last apartment I lived in was actually a townhouse that was just up the hill (and down the road from the two-bedroom apartment I shared with the bass player). It was a two bedroom place with a basement. While space was tight, there was enough room for us and we hosted our first Thanksgiving there, which went very poorly. The management of the townhouse complex was lacking, unfortunately. The electrical was still on fuses, if one fuse went out a whole row of like five townhouses would lose power. The final straw was when the owner wanted to sell the individual townhouses as condos for a price that was ludicrous even for the time (1998). So we bought the house we are living in now.