My First Home: The journey from Arkansas to Allston
Days of painting gave us an apartment you could eat: An entry hall of pumpkin, a butter yellow bedroom, a sage green living room, a warm mocha bathroom.
Lucy Jones for The Boston Globe
The pot smoke wafting through the door frame was the first sign that the one-bedroom split might not be the loveliest apartment in Allston. Our impression didn’t improve when the dazed stoners inside responded to the rental agent’s knock with a stammered plea for us to wait as they scrambled to light incense.
We couldn’t afford to be too choosy. I had just graduated from college, my then-boyfriend, Ryan, had transferred to Northeastern, and we were renting our first home in Boston.
We walked into a haze of burning cannabis and carelessly draped textiles, cheap furniture, unwashed dishes, and decades of neglect. Still, the place had promise. The high ceilings lent it an airiness that magnified its modest footprint, and its moldings were elegant beneath their countless layers of paint.
The unit had a radial layout: Off a central hallway lay the bedroom, kitchen, living room, and bathroom. The place was roughly 450 square feet, we later calculated, and it rented for three times the price of our last apartment back in Arkansas — for one-third as much space.
Welcome to Boston.
On move-in day, the place was a disaster. Kitchen cabinets overflowed with women’s shoes: heels, espadrilles, and sandals upon shelf after shelf. In the refrigerator languished weeks-old meat, brown beneath its supermarket plastic wrap.
Why had no one cleaned? Had the previous tenants deliberately left the place filthy out of some misplaced spite?
Never mind if they had. We would make it work.
Ryan took hinges and knobs off the doors, soaking them in paint stripper to reveal gleaming brass beneath. I sawed away a section of cabinet that had blocked the refrigerator and forced it to jut about a foot from the wall behind it. We fitted it into place, and took down a few cabinet doors to display our vibrant Fiesta dinnerware.
After we complained to the management about the shabby kitchen flooring, workmen uprooted the battered linoleum, glued down a few squares of cheap vinyl, then disappeared with the work half-done. I finished the job and left the supplies in the hallway for their eventual retrieval, weeks later.
Days of painting gave us an apartment you could eat: An entry hall of pumpkin, a butter yellow bedroom, a sage green living room, a warm mocha bathroom. With balsa wood and rice paper, I constructed a delicate cover for the bare bulbs on the living room ceiling.
After a month of juggling Ryan’s class schedule and my first real job with nights spent patching, painting, sawing, scraping, and endlessly cleaning, our home was complete, and it was a showplace.
We took before-and-after photos — or so we thought. It was the era of film cameras, and when we took out the 35mm roll, we saw it had not caught in the spokes. We had documented the transformation on thin air.
We lived in the apartment for two years of dinner parties with the new friends we would make and quiet evenings with our cats in the cramped living room, until we could afford larger quarters.
On our last day moving out, we returned to pick up a few final items and found that the management had already repainted, hastily replacing the cornucopia of hues with the original flat white.
Our work was undone. Worse, our showplace had been treated as less desirable than a space with no character at all.
The new apartment, though, was more than twice as large, and we had a palette of new colors we couldn’t wait to try.
Jeremy C. Fox can be reached at [email protected]. Send a 550-word essay on your first home to [email protected]. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue. Subscribe to our free real estate newsletter at pages.email.bostonglobe.com/AddressSignUp.
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