7 Things About My British Flat I Don’t Understand
I loved my British flat, but it didn’t have a single closet. That wasn’t just a question of finding somewhere to hang clothes. I had big suitcases from moving abroad, Christmas decorations and a Christmas tree that all needed to go somewhere when I wasn’t using them.
By my April 2022 account, I’d lived in several homes over six years in the UK. Some of the things I was still getting used to were small, everyday problems, like fitting a bottle of milk into the fridge. Others had finally become easier, and I was very excited about having a thermostat. Yes, a thermostat.
Where do the suitcases go?
When I say closet, I mean built-in storage with a door, rather than a piece of furniture you buy separately. It doesn’t have to hold clothes. The flat had none of that, and there was no basement or loft to take the things that wouldn’t fit in a dresser. I hadn’t really thought about closets before because I was so used to having them back home.
Getting rid of things I didn’t need sounded reasonable, but it didn’t answer the question of where to keep winter coats in summer or the decorations between Christmases. Those weren’t things I wanted to throw away. They were things I needed, just not all the time, and my giant suitcases weren’t going to disappear either.
We bought more dressers and a cabinet from Ikea for storage. The cabinet was a bit wonky and not level, but it gave us somewhere to put things. For the big items, we used a spare bit of space behind us at the top of one set of stairs. I called it the dumping ground, which tells you how tidy it was.
That space held the Christmas tree, wrapping paper, suitcases, tools and boxes of little mementos. It was ugly, but at least everything was out of the way. I loved the flat. I just hadn’t found a beautiful answer to storing all that stuff.
The baby fridge
The fridges in the UK homes I’d lived in had been smaller than I was used to, and this one was my baby fridge. Its size affected what I bought. A large milk container wouldn’t stand upright in either the door or on the shelf, so buying the smaller ones was necessary.
I’d made the mistake of buying a larger container and laying it on its side, which led to leaking milk. Large bottles of pop didn’t fit properly either, and an open bottle of wine was another problem. This wasn’t an argument about how much anybody ate. It was about whether the groceries physically fitted into my fridge.
If I ever bought a house in the UK, I wanted a slightly larger fridge. I loved where I was living, but I would have liked to stand the milk up.
The heating system I actually liked
I’d already had a home where I struggled to get the radiators balanced. I could be sitting on the couch before realising I was sweating, turn the heating down, and find myself cold a couple of hours later. Finding the right setting had been tricky.
The system in this flat was my favourite because the thermostat gave me an actual temperature number and let me set programmes. Its sensor was in a drafty part of the home, so I took the reading with a grain of salt, but I liked having a more specific way to control when the heating came on. I hoped the next place would have one too.
An open view, with occasional bees
None of the UK homes I’d lived in had mesh screens on the windows. Looking out without a screen in the way was lovely, but opening the windows also let in bees and flies. We didn’t have air conditioning in this flat, and sleeping in the summer could still be difficult for me.
I did like the sash windows here. I could move the upper section down and the lower section up, which was something I hadn’t seen in Canada, and I liked the air circulation. The clear view was a pleasure. The lost bumblebee indoors was a less convenient part of the arrangement.
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