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When I was 18 I decided it was time to move out. I got accepted to OCAD and decided that living in Toronto was much better than commuting from Brampton everyday (I remember telling my parents that living in a big city would inspire me creatively and "feed my soul"...shut up, I was going through my weirdo hippie phase), so I packed up all my shit and left.

Looking for a new place to live is always an interesting/frustrating/terrifying adventure. Getting your hopes up about an apartment, viewing it and consequently realizing it is not as nice as you had hoped is always a crushing blow to the old hopes and dreams.

When I first moved to Toronto I lived with a childhood friend and the two of us took weekends off to apartment hunt in the city. Last night, I was thinking about the whole ordeal (which ultimately ended up in me living in a cubicle for 9 months, more on that later) and I remembered this one truly awful apartment we saw that summer.

The apartment in question was located in a high-rise right near (in?) Grange Park, which is about a 30 second walk to OCAD. The unit itself was on the 18th floor, or something, it was pretty high up and the view was amazing.

However, everything else about the place was absolutely disgusting. The fridge and freezer were still full of rotten food, there were food encrusted take-out containers everywhere and I'm pretty sure I saw a few roaches that someone had successfully smashed and left behind as trophies. The two bedrooms were beside each other, one was painted black, the other painted bright red and the strangest "feature" of the whole apartment were the two, eye-level holes that had been punch through the wall the two bedrooms shared. Nathan stood in the black bedroom, I stood in the red bedroom and we both took turns spying at each other through the eye holes. Nasty.

Oh, and there was paint peeling from the ceiling.

We left that place and ended up living across the street from OCAD sharing a one bedroom apartment that cost $1250/month in rent. He got the bedroom and I constructed a room for myself in the living room area. My walls were 5 feet tall, fabric covered cubicle walls and my door was a scarf. Before moving out I had some friends over and by the end of the night we had destroyed the cubicle and trashed the place (see above photo).