My Own Apartment: The Anticipation! by Erin Letson

There's something incredibly exciting about moving into your own apartment. Yeah, there's the drudgery of packing and shuffling around your life belongings. But the prospect of a space all to yourself — no one else's dirty dishes, no overheard phone conversations, no bathroom sharing — that's ripe for starting a new chapter of life, is it not?

This is the stage I'm at. I'm less than a week away from moving into my first solo apartment, the apartment of my renting-in-Toronto dreams — a spacious corner unit in an art deco low-rise. A part of me is nervous about solitary living, especially because I work from home a couple of days a week and the prospect of not talking to anyone in a day (except over email and IM) is scary. As much as I crave alone time, I'm more of an extrovert than I'd like to admit and depend heavily on non-phone communication. Plus, I've always lived with people I care about, so I've never had the no-exchange type of housemate scenario.

But — but — the excitement of having more than one room to myself has, thankfully, surpassed any fears of hermit-dom. I've recently spent an embarrassing number of hours on Apartment Therapy imagining living room decor schemes and planning shopping lists. And if my daydreaming wasn't bad enough on its own, the recent return from an eye-opening trip to South America and the start of fall, the most transitional of seasons, means I'm cooking up resolutions in batches.

The list goes something like this: in my new apartment, I'll spend more time on personal writing projects (my half-written novel, in particular). I'll cook more, both for myself and other people. I'll read more, including spending Saturday mornings curled up with a newspaper. I'll update my RSS feed. I'll watch news again, as well as more good TV shows (something I've semi-unintentionally cut out of my life in the past eight months). I'll buy myself fresh flowers as a pick-me-up. I'll perfect polished-but-thrown-together apartment style (à la Undecorate, my current book obsession). I'll be more organized (a place for everything!) and learn how to paint walls and hang pictures and do my own home repairs.

I realize all this future-tensing is not the healthiest and against every live-in-the-moment advice I've ever read or heard. I'm trying to enjoy my final days of co-habitation, especially since my current housemate is also my oldest and closest friend and our parting for new adventures is both exciting and bittersweet.

But I'd also like to think my anticipation to move is a sign of newfound independence, of coming to terms with being totally on my own. So I'm not waiting for the year to end before making any forward-looking, self-improvement goals. The new me is only days away.

She's going live in a pretty sweet apartment and she might even invite you over for dinner.

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This is first in a series of posts about moving into your own apartment. You can find the others here.

Erin Letson is a Toronto-based writer and editor who blogs about digestive health at Fix My Gut (www.fixmygut.com). You can follow her on Twitter @erinletson.