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'awkward living accommodations in old buildings' I always find it amusing when Americans equal old buildings with subpar living conditions. Most of the apartmen

'awkward living accommodations in old buildings' I always find it amusing when Americans equal old buildings with subpar living conditions. Most of the apartments in Europe's typical 19th century buildings deliver an extremly high standard of housing that would just not be profitable to build today.

bane 13y ago
I've been in wonderful first world apartments in Europe, and wonderful old apartments in Europe. Many old original flats are beautiful and great places to live - I agree. But many old flats are not like these. They're weird semi-renovated things with modern amenities shoe horned in wherever they can fit, water heaters in living rooms, hallways snaking their way around, clothes washers in hallways or kitchens, aggregated bits of older flats glommed together to make new ones resulting in stairs in the middle of bedrooms or living rooms, tiny tiny kitchens so small that if you put a mini fridge in you can't open the door all the way so the fridge ends up in one of the bedrooms, or bedrooms which consist of a door that open to a wall, but if you look up there's a crawl space big enough for a mattress so it's called a "bedroom" (and so for privacy you get a full size door) and on and on and on. I've been in flats that were the result of gluing two or three different flats from adjacent buildings together, only the floor heights were off by a meter, and you end up with things like an extra half bath down by the bedrooms, which useless so it gets used as a closet, so if you want to shower you walk down a half flight of stairs to the en-suite full bath that's in the bedroom-converted-to-a-living-room, or where the old door was for the second flat, it's been painted over and nailed shut, but if you open it, it opens into your neighbor's kitchen (which used to be part of the hallway in that building). Or the one that had a fully renovated kitchen, but they didn't put space in for the fridge and oven at all, so you end up cooking on the coffee table in the living room on hotplates and the fridge is by the front door. Why bother designating rooms for anything if they're just going to be used as semi-all purpose rooms? You can get all the modern conveniences, sorta, but they might be in weird forms or stashed away in strange places. These are not in poor areas, but in central parts of Paris or Barcelona or Rome or wherever. Decent areas, and some of them were multi-million dollar places that simply wouldn't be acceptable, or up to basic safety and construction codes in the U.S.

bane 13y ago

I've been in wonderful first world apartments in Europe, and wonderful old apartments in Europe. Many old original flats are beautiful and great places to live - I agree. But many old flats are not like these. They're weird semi-renovated things with modern amenities shoe horned in wherever they can fit, water heaters in living rooms, hallways snaking their way around, clothes washers in hallways or kitchens, aggregated bits of older flats glommed together to make new ones resulting in stairs in the middle of bedrooms or living rooms, tiny tiny kitchens so small that if you put a mini fridge in you can't open the door all the way so the fridge ends up in one of the bedrooms, or bedrooms which consist of a door that open to a wall, but if you look up there's a crawl space big enough for a mattress so it's called a "bedroom" (and so for privacy you get a full size door) and on and on and on. I've been in flats that were the result of gluing two or three different flats from adjacent buildings together, only the floor heights were off by a meter, and you end up with things like an extra half bath down by the bedrooms, which useless so it gets used as a closet, so if you want to shower you walk down a half flight of stairs to the en-suite full bath that's in the bedroom-converted-to-a-living-room, or where the old door was for the second flat, it's been painted over and nailed shut, but if you open it, it opens into your neighbor's kitchen (which used to be part of the hallway in that building). Or the one that had a fully renovated kitchen, but they didn't put space in for the fridge and oven at all, so you end up cooking on the coffee table in the living room on hotplates and the fridge is by the front door. Why bother designating rooms for anything if they're just going to be used as semi-all purpose rooms? You can get all the modern conveniences, sorta, but they might be in weird forms or stashed away in strange places. These are not in poor areas, but in central parts of Paris or Barcelona or Rome or wherever. Decent areas, and some of them were multi-million dollar places that simply wouldn't be acceptable, or up to basic safety and construction codes in the U.S.