The apartment that taught us everything
- Laura Moore: Housebroken
- May 20, 2025
- 61
As newlyweds, Taller Half and I lived in an apartment. Turns out that place was a veteran of many newlyweds’ first attempts at housekeeping. We owe that apartment a debt of thanks for the lessons we learned while living there.
The truth was Taller Half and I were abysmally inept when it came to running a household. We honestly believed housekeeping skills were an instinct activated by wedding vows. After a few months, it was painfully obvious those skills weren’t instinctive; they had to be learned.
Fortunately for us and our future houses, that old apartment taught us a particularly invaluable skill: the care and maintenance of appliances. Back then, in the olden days as our children called them, refrigerators and stoves had not yet evolved into the self-sufficient machines they are today. In those days refrigerators and stoves still needed help with their personal hygiene. Taller Half and I were perfectly willing to be of assistance. We just didn’t know how.
After about three months, the oven looked like the black hole of Calcutta and a glacier had formed in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. The situation required action. We bought a can of oven cleaner that promised a clean oven with no work, so we bought it,
sprayed the oven and forgot about it. Several days later, when we turned the oven on, we were nearly asphyxiated by the fumes and smoke. We had learned our first lesson — always read the directions.
The refrigerator had no directions, but it did have a knob marked “defrost.” We turned the knob and left for work. We returned home to find a defrosted refrigerator sitting in a kitchen-sized lake. From that experience, we also learned a lot about water damage to floors.
That apartment had one more lesson to teach us, which was about garbage disposals. Vegetarians by nature, disposals do not like bones. If a bone should accidentally fall into their gaping mouths, they will spit it out with great force. So we also learned the dietary preferences of garbage disposals.
And while we thought we had learned a lot about keeping a house when we moved from that apartment into our first house, the truth was our housekeeping education was just beginning.
Laura Moore can be emailed at lehmoore1@gmail.com.