Answers to this week’s questions at https://thefridayfive.livejournal.com/201437.html
1. What does the outside of your house look like?
It’s a four story apartment building, in a circle with 3 row/terraced houses, of the type where the hallways are open and unheated, and the front doors opens directly to outside. It’s red and white and there’s a tower housing the lift and stairs to stories 2-4.
2. Which room do you spend the least time in?
Technically: the sauna (I only go there to vacuum).
3. Which room do you spend the most time in?
But I guess these two questions mean “living space” in which case my answer is I spend roughly 50% in the bedroom and 50% in the kitchen/living room. I have a small apartment with only the bedroom, bathroom and the sauna as their own rooms (they have doors). The kitchen and the living room are one continuous space with the entry to the apartment along with a tiny foyer/hallway with just enough for shoes and outdoor clothes rack and two tall cabinets to the side. My kitchen table is a meter from from my living room couch. So I don’t have choice where to spend time in, especially since I try to dedicate the bedroom only for sleeping (and reading real books).
4. Is your home in a convenient location?
Yes, very.
It’s only 15 minutes (25 minutes during rush hour) to the city center by a bus that goes by every 7 minutes during work days for most of the entire day, and in addition there’s also three other useful-to-me bus lines going past my building every hour – one of which is a service line directed especially to older people and those the sick or have challenges in moving, but everyone is welcome to use it. It’s just slow. It goes to a on hospital on top of a big hill, a couple of different department stores at opposite sites of the city and goes through many smaller streets that normal bus lines don’t, and it also picks up and lets out people between stops unlike the normal busses. It takes an hour to get to the city center using this bus, versus the 15-25 minutes on the normal bus. It’s usually less crowded than normal busses, and drivers drive much more gently and smoothly, and are more quick to help if you need help getting say, a wheelchair inside or off. And also there’s also a school bus line for those who have young children that goes by my building but not having kids I obviously don’t have experience about that. And the bus stops going both directions are literally in front of my building!
There’s a small shopping center a 5 minute bus ride away (15 minute walking distance for me) with a good shop for everyday groceries and such, as well as a post office and pharmacy which I’m real happy about because I have to get things from the pharmacy several times a month, and my packages arrive to that post office so it’s easy for me to pick them up whenever I’m doing my regular shopping. I mainly use this small shopping center for all my needs.
There’s two big department stores by different chains 5-8 minute car or bus drive away, and the only negative thing is that the big department store I prefer (because it’s cheaper than the other one) isn’t reachable by one bus but needs three and takes half an hour one way even though by car it’s only 8 minutes away. Back when I had a car I shopped there 2-3 times a month – it was nice to do the big weekly shop there, and then do small additional shops/pharmacy runs in the small shopping center near me. Now that I don’t have a car and depend on the busses I use the other more expensive one, but luckily it’s in a bigger shopping centre with a satellite library, pharmacy, SpecSavers and other eye glass shops, many shoes and clothing shops, and shops like Clas Olsson, and smaller specialty shops like a shoemaker who fixes old shoes and bags and things and cafes and restaurants so usually if I’m shopping for those things, that’s where I go.
The city library has two mobile libraries which drive around all around the city every day. One of them stops 2 minutes away from me on Thursdays. The only down side of the mobile library is that if you have books on-hold waiting to be picked you can only do it on Thursdays for 30 minutes, so at some point I switched mostly using the main library in the city centre where I can pick them up at any day and which is open from 9am to 8pm on work days, and less but still 6 hours on Saturdays and Sundays. But I could get by only by using the mobile library if I wanted to!
It’s also convenient that my GP and laboratory and one of the hospitals (there’s two hospitals I need to go to both of which are easy to get to without needing to go through the city center) are on the route to the city centre, along with my hair dresser and the art supplies store where I buy acrylic paints etc.
My Mom also lives fairly close to me – when I was healthy, I’d always walk to her place and that’d take me about 35 minutes. I’ve always walked rather slow, and when my Mom, whose always walked fast (except those years when her Beagle was still alive when she walked her pace and that was slow because you, Beagle and her nose), walks over to my place, she takes about 20 minutes. So at a normal walking pace it’d probably take somewhere between those times. Maybe someday I can go back to walking to Mom’s again. Now I take the bus, and so have to go through the city center.
So yes, my home is located very conveniently! Everything I need frequently is at most 30 minutes away by bus. It’s such a good location that every time I’ve thought of moving, none of the apartments I’ve looked at have come to even close to being as conveniently located as this. I’m really spoiled as far as access to busses and convenient shopping/pharmacy/post office goes! And I didn’t even plan this when I moved – I only checked that a bus went by three times an hour and that there was a shop close by, and that this was close enough but not too close to my Mom’s. It’s been very pleasing to realize once I got ill and need for all the hospitals and labs and doctors came into the picture, that I could get to them easily and quickly.
All this and I don’t even live in the city center, but in one of the suburbs with greenery around me, and even a couple of working fields.
5. What is the color of your front door?
It’s white.