A roof over my head
I've been in a lot of other people's flats this week, not because I've become a burglar, because we're looking for a new place to rent. Luxurious Stokes Towers has served us well for two years, but the craving for those little extras, like a kitchen bigger than a fish finger and a room temperature above three degrees centigrade in the winter, have become too strong to resist. My first mistake was visiting the web site of a local estate agent.
Where does Poland get its estate agents? Are they recruited directly from the ranks of fraud convicts or is there a special training centre run by the mafia? This one left me standing in front of the building for half an hour, without explanation, and then demanded that I sign a contract before I even saw the place. To be precise, she said: "How much will you agree to pay the agency if you decide to rent this place?" "Ten zloty," I said. I don't think it was the answer she was looking for. It's a bizarre idea: that I should pay a month's rent for a service that is essentially little more than unlocking a door. In this case she didn't even do that because the owners were there. Am I mad, or should it be the owners who pay for the service of finding someone to rent their place? I decided to stay away from rental agencies because I didn't want to wake up next to a severed horse's head.
The other alternative is Gumtree—an online small ads service created in the UK and now well established over here. Gumtree lets you filter agency ads and almost never visits you in the middle of the night with a baseball bat. It's also hilarious. There's something about writing small ads that makes everybody a liar. For a start, every flat is described as being "peaceful and quiet." A flat constructed from cardboard inside a lawnmower testing facility would be described as "peaceful and quiet." All flats are also "close to the centre" where "close" apparently means "on the same continent." They are also, without fail, "recently renovated." I realise there are degrees of renovation, but I don't think just painting everything, including the doors and the toilet, bright yellow is one of them.
For reasons that I'm not sure I ever want to understand, toilets always feature prominently in the photos that accompany these ads. No matter how few and incompetent the photos are, one of then will always be of the toilet. In some cases there are only pictures of the toilet, shot from various angles and with romantic lighting. I'm quite prepared to believe you if you just say there is a toilet. It never occurred to me that there might be flats without toilets, so you're just making me suspicious.
The deadliest trap for the flat hunter is the roof apartment. They always look fabulous in the photos—all big open spaces, spiral staircases and shiny new toilets—and they are always a nightmare to live in. The roofs of old Polish buildings are extremely clever structural devices developed over centuries to help keep places cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Unlike the roofs of English buildings they are thin, light structures usually covered with sheet metal that shrugs off heavy rain and snow. They trap a large insulating volume of air above the, often massive, ceiling of the top floor. Great idea for temperature control, very bad idea for a place to live. You bake in the summer and freeze in the winter. Also, spiral staircases are a bit like underwear models: you think it would be cool to have one in your house, but in fact it’s a time-consuming pain.
The search continues. If I ever do find a reasonably-priced flat that is genuinely close to the centre, isn’t in the roof and doesn’t require a contract written in Sicilian blood you’ll know about it: there will be reports on the news about a mysterious Englishman dancing naked in the streets.
Jamie Stokes