vykim's Profile

I live in Wrigleyville. I used a cheap Radio Shack, rabbit-ears style antenna for a while, which was fine but ugly. I then switched to the Mohu, purely for aesthetics.

Ideally, I'd want a clear line of sight to the south, but I don't have a clear line of sight to the south from my apartment. So I taped the Mohu directly on a north-facing window (then covered the antenna and wiring with blinds), and got just about every channel antennaweb.org thought I should get, except for WYIN (Indiana's PBS station). The trickiest station was Channel 2 (CBS), for which I had to play around with the Mohu's placement before I taped it in place.

I've done my own laundry since I was 10.

Now, it's two of us (married, no kids) and laundry gets done when the hamper (which holds a good-sized load) gets full -- about once a week. We don't own an iron anymore -- if something really needs to get ironed, it gets dropped off at the dry cleaners. But most (90%) of our non-work clothes don't requiring ironing and I have never seen the point of ironing linens.

As for our professional wardrobes, suits and work separates get dry-cleaned about once a quarter (unless something gets stained) and button-down shirts get cleaned and pressed.

I probably have too many clothes. I could go a month and not wear the same outfit. He recently lost quite a bit of weight and we're working on rebuilding his professional wardrobe, so I haven't purchased much for myself in a while. I'm not hurting for it! We just hit our goal of having enough for him to wear to work for two weeks: enough for one week's worth of shirts to rotate at the dry cleaners and home.

We rent and we're more than "okay" with that -- we love it. There just are no downsides to our current situation: our landlords are lovely, our location is perfect, the unit is private and charming and the perfect size. Anytime something goes wrong, big or small, it gets fixed quickly and without any hassel. We have free license to decorate the place to our tastes.

And for the money, there's no way we could buy what we have now for less than we're paying. I do keep my eye on the Chicago condo/house market, but even at its low point, renting in our neighborhood was always cheaper. Now that the market is picking up, renting is so much cheaper!

The best thing we did to save our sanity when we moved from a home with a dishwasher to a home without a dishwasher: we got rid of 75% of our dishes. We kept one set of white dishes and donated the rest. Then we had to dishes promptly, or else quickly run out of dishes for the next meal!

I don't believe in love at first sight, but I've fallen in lust with homes: once, a condo that we purchased, and twice, in apartments we rented.

Lust quickly turned into love with the condo, but the location was near my law school and was less-than-ideal after I finished. It was also, frankly, too small for the long term. But it was charming and I still miss it.

In one apartment, I fell in lust with the light and space. It was the biggest one bedroom apartment I've ever seen, with all sorts of nooks and crannies for all our toys (his wine collection, our books, my craft supplies, our a/v equipment, his musical instruments, my home office...). But lust turned into "eh" after we moved in: the very nice, but very stupid neighbor upstairs had a very annoying dog and the very nice, but very ineffectual landlord drove me crazy.

I immediately fell into lust with our current home: we first viewed it in the middle of a summer thunderstorm and it was so cozy and comforting from the get go. It's a charming, brick coach house with a French village house feel in the middle of Chicago. We've been here for 8 months now and I've fallen head over heels in love with this place, despite its drawbacks (it's an old, drafty building that's tough to keep toasty in the winter). I'm now building a nest egg in case our landlords ever want to sell -- I'd buy this whole complex in a heartbeat in order to stay here.

We went from three bedrooms to one bedroom a few years ago. Best move we ever made. Some thoughts:

1. We got rid of furniture by selling (and buying a few smaller replacements) on Craigslist. For example, we sold our large, rectangular dining table and bought a smaller, round dining table. We sold our bed and bought one with built-in storage. We sold my large desk (one of our bedrooms was a home office) and bought a c-table, perfect for a laptop during the day and an end table in the living room at night. In fact, we sold all of our home office and guest room furniture. We sold half our bookcases because the apartment we were moving into had built-ins.

2. We love our couch. I mean, we LOVE our couch. Since we lost our guest room, we thought it would make so much sense to sell it and buy a sofa bed, and it's a bit too wide for our current home, but we love the couch. So we kept it. In the three years since we got rid of our guest room, we've had exactly three sets of overnight guests. We've tried a different solution each time: one slept on our couch, we borrowed an air mattress for a couple, and we bought a fold-up mattress for another couple, which has been our favorite solution. In the meantime, we've continued to own and love and enjoy our couch. No regrets. Moral of this story: if there's a piece you love, it can be worth the effort to make it work in a smaller space.

3. That said, pieces that can do double duty are wonderful. Instead of a coffee table, we have storage ottomans, which also provide extra seating when we have people over. Bookcases are also our file storage (easy enough with file boxes on the lowest shelves). Our shoe storage cubbies by the front door is also a bench and our landing strip.

4. The toughest part for us was our books. We both love hard copies of books: while our electronic library is extensive, we like having books in hand. They never run out of battery power! So while we made some easy changes (getting rid of duplicates, getting rid of books that we wouldn't mind owning exclusively electronically, getting rid of out-of-date technical/professional tomes), we also culled out quite a bit more than that. Instead of asking ourselves what we'd like to keep, we asked ourselves what we'd miss (and what was hard to replace if we did get rid of it). That helped cut about 30% of them (which is HUGE for us!). In the past three years, we've missed exactly 2 books (one of which we borrowed from the library and the other we replaced with an electronic copy).

We don't miss the space. The only thing we missed was our outdoor spaces (we went from having a balcony and a terrace to having a tiny, dark deck that only fit our grill), so we moved again to an even smaller home, but with lots of outdoor space.

Very cute. But that's a lot of knick-knacks!

We bought the predecessor version, the Lattisima, last summer when it was on clearance. When our last coffee maker died, my spouse wanted an espresso machine but I rarely drink espresso shots and I balked at the price of automatic espresso machines. (Seriously: have you seen the price of some of those things?!?!) After some persuasion on his part, I agreed to get one that does milk drinks as well with the push of one button (because I'm lazy when it comes to making coffee). My take on the cons:

1. Waste. Nespresso's recycling program helps makes me feel a bit better. Before, we were throwing out coffee grounds because as much as I'd love to compost, there's a serious rat problem in my neighborhood and I'm not going to start a compost pile that will attract them. The capsules are aluminum (= easily recycled) and the grounds are separated out by Nespresso, so we just drop off our used capsules when we pick up new ones. (Of course, for all I know, Bloomingdales then throws them out...)

2. Not-quite-idiot-proof: the milk version. It turns out I'm a bigger idiot in the morning that most. When we first got the machine, I kept forgetting to point the milk spigot to the mug (it normally folds into the container), creating an awful mess of foamy milk all over the counter. Now I store the milk container with the spigot sticking out the side, at the perfect angle for my mugs, so I don't need to remember to unfold it.

3. Not-quite-idiot-proof: the coffee version. I don't want to admit to the number of watered-down mugs of milk I've prepared because I'd forgotten to drop in a capsule...

That's about it as far as "cons" go. Otherwise, it makes a decent latte, a decent cap, a decent shot of espresso, and I don't need to think too hard about it. And it's so nice to have a hot beverage pretty much on demand. (We have this fancy coffee machine, but we don't have a microwave!)

Nor am I tempted to drop in the Starbucks that is right behind my house (or the Intelligensia that's 2 blocks away or the cafe serving Metropolis coffee that's 1 block away or the Caribou that's also 2 blocks away), so the money saved over the past six months or so is probably quite significant.

Not to mention that my milk consumption has increased, which is great for this Asian chick who rarely otherwise eats or drinks dairy products!

I like the playroom, but the living and dining rooms make me feel cold: it's 20 degrees in Chicago today and I love the feeling of my wool rugs underfoot...

Our realtor wanted us to clear out all of our books. We had packed five bookcases in the living room, four downstairs in the family room. Getting rid of all of the books wasn't going to happen. But we did everything else he instructed us to do.

We ended up clearing about 2/3 of our books, half our furniture, re-staging rooms for different purposes (the family room turned into a large bedroom, one of our master suites was staged as an office, our pantry was re-converted into a hall closet), clearing out half the stuff in our closets (to show off the Elfa systems)...

Most of the stuff we cleared away was put into storage. Some was sold via Craigslist, some was donated. Anything truly valuable was small enough to put into a safe deposit box.

I'd actually vote against the idea of storing stuff under the beds. That just screams "there's not enough storage here!" to a buyer.