copycats!

by sam on 10/13/2005

Had the day off today for Yom Kippur. Of course, I’m still in Rome, so I didn’t get to go to temple, but I did fast (and just finished dinner). While I was reading the Times online today, I did my periodic perusal of the real estate listings to see if there had been any new apartments in my building put on the market.

There’s one which has an identical layout to my place, but has the crappiest furniture I’ve ever seen (and yes, I realize that this is just "stuff" from the realtors so that people can gauge what furniture will look like, but you’d think they’d pick something not, so, fugly, or lay it out in a way that didn’t cut off half of the living room).

And then I saw one thatt’s new to the market, and I’m pretty sure the building was still renovating it before I left (it’s a flip to market – the sponsor renovated it themselves to sell it for the first time). And instead of the standard kitchen renovation that the building has done to all vacated apartments to date, which involves standard sized (and ugly) white appliances and weird sink that is only two inches deep and sits on top of the dishwasher, I notice that they’ve got my stove! and the special extra-small dishwasher (of course they didn’t splurge for the one that actually matches the rest of the appliances, but still!)…the fridge has a similar look too, but it’s not the same (it can’t be, since my model was discontinued about 30 seconds after I bought mine). It’s a different layout generally, because it’s a 2-bedroom apartment, but it made me laugh.

I did notice when I was in the stairwell before I left that there was a box for the same stove that I had bought – now I know where it went!

I suppose enough building handymen (not to mention the super) saw what I did in my kitchen in all of their trips in and out to approve things and got inspired to do something a little bit nicer than what had been done to date.

heh. what’s funny is that I spent months obsessing over how to do the kitchen so that it wasn’t as space-wasting, inefficient, and ugly as the ones the building had done themselves. I guess they agreed with me.

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