I’m still in the throes of conducting due diligence on the beautiful condo with the stinky hallway, and I haven’t unearthed much today, so in the meantime, we’ll return to our scheduled programming, as they say on TV. So, after rejecting the spacious vintage condo in Rogers Park, we started to tour some of the old courtyard apartment buildings and three-flats that developers are gut rehabbing around the neighborhood. For the most part, we weren’t impressed with what we found.
My criticisms? I don’t like it when developers of three-flats don’t even go to the effort of giving a buyer a decent-sized deck – they just give you one of those squidgy little black iron balconies. Is this because they have to preserve the building’s facade? I don’t know.
My next beef? The floor plans really suck. I always thought people were overly anal about floor plans until I actually started looking at places that could be my future home. Then I realized why people get so pedantic about such things. It’s the old maxim: double-bowl vanities save marriages.
One of the few good things that I can say about developers these days is that most of them provide two bathrooms. I have plenty of bad things to say about their floor plans, however.
I know that the developers in Rogers Park are hamstrung, to some extent, by the fact that these buildings were once apartments, but I’m tired of seeing condos where the living room / dining room is all squashed into one tiny space. Let’s call it a “dive room.” And that dive room is usually shoved in right next to the kitchen.
I stood in the dive room of one particular condo and stared in disbelief while the chatty developer’s agent tried to sell me on the place. I pointed out that in order to fit in the couch and TV, our dining table would have to be wedged up against a wall, right near the refrigerator. Add a chair on the side of the dining table that is closest to the fridge, and there wouldn’t be enough room to swing a cat in the space. (Not that I would – cat-swinging is a cruel practise).
Having the dining room table so close to the damn kitchen takes all the mystery out of the entertaining experience. I’d probably end up clobbering a friend when I opened the refrigerator door, and I don’t like the idea that I’d be sitting at the table, trying to enjoy my meal, when all I could see where the dirty pots and pans, waiting for me in the sink. It feels so college apartment. And damn it, we deserve something better for the kind of money that we would be paying.
So I exited the dive room of this particular condo and headed for the bedroom. I was immediately taken by the enormous size of the bedroom. I’d never seen anything like it. Then my amazement turned to irritation when it dawned on me that the developer probably could have made the bedroom a few feet shorter, and the dive room a few feet longer.
On that particular day we had a buyer’s realtor showing us around, and she educated us on how to look for signs of quality – poor or good. Look in the bathroom, she said. The limestone tiles were only installed three-quarters of the way up the wall of the shower, rather than all the way.
We found out that it was the developer’s first project in Rogers Park, and that he normally worked in Lincoln Park. “He thought he could cut corners here because it’s Rogers Park,” our agent said. She also pointed out that the light fittings were cheap. Then there was the whirlpool tub – she counted the bathroom tiles adjacent to the tub. There were five, which meant that the tub’s width was five feet. My husband and I are both tall. “You’d use the tub once, then you wouldn’t bother with it again,” our agent said.
With that, we walked the few steps back through the dive room and out the front door.