In an effort to share my wins and celebrate myself more fully, I am excited to tell my friends in my phone about my new project.
I bought a condo!
It’s in New Haven, CT right on the river and I’m very hopeful that a ground floor, no steps unit will make a difference in my day-to-day life. Looking for housing when you can’t really walk is an adventure. Possibly a blog post for another day. We’ll see if I can get a casual writing practice to stick now that I am not under incredible stress from being unable to control the increasingly decrepitude of my home.
The building is a former factory and the brick walls and high, industrial ceilings remind me of my favorite buildings in downtown Wilmington that have now been mostly overtaken by chain stores. It’s beautiful, weird, and ready for my special touch. We’re located next to a drawbridge just upriver from a working marina, occasional gnarly sea smells and all.
Indoor Air Quality
We’re working on getting into a routine: Bobo the orange cat wakes everyone up around 6 a.m., demanding pets. He falls back to sleep on top of someone, and the sun starts pouring in just enough to start the day. We always leave the windows cracked for ventilation, but the CO2 in our condo has barely brimmed to 750 with the windows closed. IYKYK this is a huge deal for a residential building (and the reason air quality is so good is because this was not always a residential building!). Everest has asthma and residual breathing constraints from Long Covid and have long required a thorough indoor air purification setup to survive their infested apartments in Massachusetts.
I’ve been testing the CO2 levels in the two bedrooms today, after learning that we are the unit with the most windows! This makes sense because we’re on the corner, where we can see both entrances to the parking lot and the main entrance where deliveries arrive, so we know what’s going on. The building is something like 27 units and I’ve met probably a dozen people, all extremely nice and varying degrees of social, from too busy to talk to our lovely shared wall neighbor Susan, who shared about her many exciting activities she partakes in across New Haven.
Who’s Who
We have been warned about the person who has installed cameras in every single window for some reason? I actually did not need a warning to be wary of anyone who feels they need to surveil *checks notes* the common garden area out back. Our building is definitely in the city, with human beings nearby to match. If you hate everyone and cannot tolerate human interaction, it seems like a strange decision to live in a decidedly urban environment surrounded by—you guessed it—humans. I generally like to live nearby to other people, although I prefer the people of CT to the people of western MA by a pretty startling margin.
I’m extremely grateful for my partner Everest for being an amazing teammate and my mom for sending me money to live on after emptying all of my accounts for this unit!!! I have had to forego medical care, travel, leisure, and a fun budget for several years to lock in accessible housing so that I can plan and live the rest of my life!!!! I do know how lucky I am, as I have spent the last few years really struggling with accessibility in my own home.
It Sucks to Have to Make Decisions Based on Physical Barriers Instead of Actual Preference
Most recently, the bathroom was on a different floor, which resulted in many excruciating climbs to the toilet on shaky legs and throbbing ankles. I was not able to shower as frequently as I would like because it was also upstairs. This led to challenging hygiene concerns, including recurring pain, lesions, and general skin discomfort that led to me cutting all my hair off and keeping it that way as a treatment for whatever has been happening to cause my searing scalp pain. Having hair makes it worse, and dirty hair amps up the severity significantly. So I’m bald now. Luckily I look really cute bald, IMHO!
Accessibility problems aren’t all fixed here either. My manual chair doesn’t fit through the doorways inside, but the studs are aligned vertically in our walls here, which was a relief after several years living in another cheap flipped apartment where the wall studs were… horizontal for some reason? So imagine our delight upon discovering that our studs are, in fact, normal this time!! At least I can decide on the changes I need for my own safety and accessibility and actually make those changes. Albeit very slowly.
Crip Tax
If you’re not one of my beloved disabled friends, you may not know that we face “crip tax” AKA a ~40% surcharge to achieve the same level of access as non-disabled people. Accessible housing is basically nonexistent, or is rented out at extreme markups as “luxury” units. It is not a luxury to be able to get into your own home and use your amenities when inside.
I forget that so much of my life is unimaginable to non-disabled people. When I share my good news at work, people ask about subsidized accessible housing programs, which I’m not eligible for as I make too much money. Ha ha. All that money disappears incredibly fast when you cannot walk.
My new home is not “ADA accessible,” but it has a lot of what I need, including an entrance without stairs and zero steps inside. And with time and support, I hope to add additional accessibility features to keep me safe and comfortable, including grab bars, wider doorways, and a zero-threshold shower!
Other projects on the docket:
Everest has been learning all kinds of crucial butch knowledge from their year working at a certain blue-themed home improvement big box store.
We’ve been plotting about adding our own “custom built-ins” using IKEA shelves that we can actually paint a pretty color of my choosing!!! I’m of course leaning towards lavender or a purpley-pink I’m enjoying called Magic Wand (😘).
If you want to help me celebrate my huge accessible housing milestone, I have created a Throne wishlist 👑 please no pressure! This is shared with urging from my loved ones who have watched me pay for every single accessible alternative I have ever had out of my personal wages for a decade. I am immensely grateful to have my basic needs accounted for at this time!
Thanks for reading, xo
Jesse Rice-Evans 