where to begin?

with the doorknobs and other high-touch surfaces.

In terms of years, this new apartment of mine is the very youngest home that I’ve ever lived in. Built in 1953, the building is practically a baby and still, a few weeks of living here has been a reminder that there’s an awful lot that can transpire in 72 years of a building’s life.

Just to reassure concerned readers, I’ll start by saying that there are many very good things about this apartment, most significantly the fact that it’s more affordable than our last one and with luck it won’t be a place the landlord is hoping to sell to venture capitalists in the next five years. All fingers cross, et cetera. It’s also an apartment that was designed to be an apartment. It’s one of a hundred or so in a classic postwar lowrise building. Inside, there are two proper bedrooms and something that could definitely be called a entranceway. There are closets in multiples. Nary a child needs to walk through our bedroom to get to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

There’s some charm, too. The bathroom is of a midcentury vintage with the pink tub and pink and gray contrasting tile to show for it. The medicine cabinets are original to the apartment and so is a built-in bathroom hamper. The postwar hardwood floors have been kept in miraculously good shape. The hollow core doors nearly all have solid brass knobs. Six floors up, we get beautiful light and there are double exposure windows in both of the bedrooms. Did I mention there’s laundry in the building? An embarrassment of riches.

There are also things about this apartment that demand attention. Caulking around the baseboards of the entire apartment appears to have been done in the dark and with an ice cream scoop. The mid-century convector radiator covers are bent and chipping and, dear god, the dirt that’s accumulated inside the grate looks like something straight out of a crematorium. Every door hinge in the apartment has been painted over, only two of the latches catch properly, and every one of those solid brass door knobs was covered in paint and chipping lacquer before I got to them. The windows let in beautiful western and northern light, but at least two of the double panes have failed and gone cloudy. There are several window screens that are well on their way to returning to dust. Metal window frames show vestiges of duct tape and insulating foam from slap-dash air conditioner installations and they’re riddled with holes that will require special materials to fill. The vintage tile in the bathroom is chipped in places, there’s a highly questionable gap between the tile and the window, and the whole room needed to be recaulked. An embarrassment, period.

Larger so-called improvements made over the years have also been dubious at best: Vinyl sheet flooring in the kitchen in a faux wood grain that competes with the faux wood grain of the cabinets and a bathroom vanity made of particle board that’s already peeling. Every wall of the apartment suffers from baby formula yellow paint that’s now spotted in the places where I had to fill dozens of nail holes. The overhead light fixtures are hideous to a one and don’t get me started on the ceiling fan.

Those things will get their due, but first, I need to focus on the minutiae. Moving into an apartment where the small things—the doorknobs and the switch plates and the toilet seats—have been meticulously maintained has not been a reality I’ve enjoyed. So instead of going right for the big picture improvements—paint and lighting and window treatments—I tend to home in on the much smaller things, with the central question being what are the high-touch places and on a scale of 1 to 10 how skeeved out does touching them make me?