jon

"Rethinking Apartment Layout for Social Hosting and Work-Life Balance"

Transcript: I want to do a little recap of the thinking that Savannah and I have been doing about our apartment layout. So right now we've got a two bedroom and we're using each of the bedrooms for our personal studio spaces. I've got one, she's got one, and it's working great. In fact, I think like living with someone else, this is pretty much up there in terms of layouts. It's awesome because we have a shared common space, the living room where our bed is, which is a little unorthodox, but it's kind of fun. And then we've got our two cozy little nooks for taking calls, just decompressing, chilling, all that. And she's made hers basically like a small dance studio and mine is a man cave and it works. But lately we have been thinking about hosting more and past couple of times we've had people over. It's been a bit of a mad dash to make sure the bed looks halfway decent and we pick up the things on the floor. There's just a level of messiness that I think a personal bedroom has that a living room doesn't generally get to, but we're using our living room as our personal bedroom so those things are mixed now and it's kind of difficult. And this tracks with timing-wise the fact that we want to host more events in our apartment building. We've got friends walking distance from our apartment building that we want to invite more. Basically there's a whole host of factors here that makes us really want to have a living room that's almost like drop-in capable. People just like free on an evening at 7pm and we're just like come on over and normally we'd be kind of laying in bed because that's like our couch effectively. But you can't really invite a random person onto the bed with you, at least not in most circumstances. So we've been at the sketchpad, the brainstorm thing for a while and nothing conclusive yet, but here are the top things that we're considering. So number one is we rent a co-working space pass for me since I generally enjoy working out of the home more than she does. She really values being able to dance between work sessions whereas I like coffee shop vibes a lot and the only place I get out a lot to work is coffee shops. So there's this co-working space near us but it's about a 15 minute walk-ish, 4 minute bike ride. So it might be a little hard to commit to doing on a really cold snowy day. At which point, because my bedroom might become the actual bedroom, I could work on the couch but then calls are a little trickier and yeah. So that's one option. It's fine but not ideal but fine because the co-working space is really nice. I've been to a meet up there before. It's really warm and cozy and a bunch of plants and nice lighting, all that. Then option two is, well, there's a place, there's an office, a little commercial office next door, right next door to our apartment building and they've got units going for something like $6.50 a month, thereabouts. So basically turning that into an extra bedroom, not an extra, my studio. So it would be separate from the apartment building which is actually nice but a very short walk and I love the need to get outside. I just don't love a necessary long commute but this feels like it could be something. That place could be set up to be pretty private and cozy as well. I'll just move my workstation into there and kind of benefit of being able to split that with someone or have other people co-work out of there as well maybe. Depends on the layout. We haven't gotten a tour yet but all that's kind of an interesting prospect as well. But that's about two times more than the co-working space which is about $4.50 a month. This would be $6.50 plus utilities plus probably some supplies and whatnot furniture that we don't have yet. Option three which I forgot to mention is to turn our bed into a living room. We've been doing some sketching and some research on that, and it's not easy, at least price-wise these things are expensive, build-wise not easy either, so it's an option, but these Murphy bed couch convertible things cost like six grand, which is a lot. I mean, couches are expensive, beds are expensive, but goddamn when you put them together like that. So this is like maybe least on our list, and it still ultimately has a similar friction of, well, you still got to put up the bed and put the sheets somewhere, put the pillow somewhere. It's better than what we have now. We've also looked at like totally DIY solutions to this, but that's going to take a fair bit of work. Moving things that are assembled into our apartment is a nightmare. So as much as possible, it has to be assembled and painted on the thing. There's just complications there. Finally, another option that we've been considering is, and this one nicely aligns with long-term community planning and apartment building community organizing efforts, is to rent the one-bedroom unit next to us. And to turn it into a more or less like a guest unit for our friends, for our friends of friends. Not a sublet, not an Airbnb. God forbid our apartment building sees it that way. It would be like under our name, and nobody else would be on the lease. But I would take the bedroom in there as an office, and the living room, kitchen area would just be a banging communal co-hosting, events hosting space for us, for the apartment building, and for other people that live near us. And while arguably the most expensive proposition here, coming in at like $1,900 a month-ish, maybe $1,700, maybe $1,600 actually, I think we can get it down a little bit, it's a lot of work to make an entire second apartment feel cozy. So we're not jumping at this, but I do really like the idea of having an easy place for anybody in the world to come visit us, have their own bathroom, their own space. It's cool, Fractal in New York did something similar, Andrew and Priya really early on, they had an extra unit available for friends that were curious to move into the apartment building, but not quite ready to commit to a year lease. There's details that would need to be worked out there if it's a longer stay than seven days, which is the legal limit. But that might be interesting even for people that already live in Boulder but don't live in our neighborhood and want to just get a taste of arguably a really nice walkable neighborhood that we think is really nice and special. So there you have it, I think that's roughly all of the possible shapes and combinations that I see right now. Yeah, they vary in price and pain, but we also have this new need that we didn't really have when we moved in together, which is we want to host more things, we want to have something closer to an open-door friends New York show style drop-in relationship with people. It's like Friday night, just come by with your dinner and let's watch an episode of something together. And all that's just harder to do when we need to know ahead of time that people are going to be there so that we can clean up the place, so that we can move the bed out of the way, it's just harder. So yeah, that's kind of the main reasoning here, and it's been nice to just get it all out into a summary.