Rental Opportunity of the Week: This Place Is a Whole New Low

What is it? Two kinds of Dad’s Sheds, I find, and whichever Dad’s Shed you grew up with is reflective of the type of dad you have, and therefore the person you are destined to become: the first Dad Shed, an immaculate new-build B&Q job, varnished to that high horrible orange colour, neat storage for the Flymo and tools, and maybe that bike your dad got from Halford’s to commute to the station on for that summer after his blood pressure check-up. That is “Dad Shed #1”. I did not grow up with that shed. I grew up with Dad Shed #2, which is this: a sort of creaking, haunted, greying place, dust and cobwebs and weird uses for offshoots of carpet you recognise from the main house (“Is this a… rabbit hutch? We never even had a rabbit”), ancient frayed magazines that fall somewhere between arthouse and full pornographic, one entire panel of the shed (the one that fell in during that storm) has been patched over with a big mismatching piece of MDF your dad found in that skip, and he started to paint over it with a tester pot of paint but got bored halfway through, so now it’s just nailed there, half MDF, half the colour of blue the bathroom was going to be for a bit, and there are wellies here and those brown crisped-up old spiders there, and tins of cigarettes from a different era, and a wooden stepladder and a delicate balance, always, that if you touch the wrong thing it will initiate a sort of rustic Rube Goldberg machine, the paint tin hits the screwdriver hits the old shelves from the living room hits the box of nails hits the mallet hits the golf club, all conspiring to lock hard against the door in a way that means you, shouting, trapped, won’t be discovered there until eight hours later, when your parents have called the police to initiate a search. So that is Dad Shed #2. This is like the flat equivalent of Dad Shed #2. 
Where is it? Forest Gate. If you have been to Stratford, know this: there are places beyond Stratford, even greyer places with even more train warehouses along them, and Forest Gate is one of them.
What is there to do locally? One thing the sweeping gentrification of east London has failed to eradicate – and never, ever will – is the presence in every east London borough of That One Salty Old Nan Who Knew The Krays. Every single district has one. In certain areas, there is one per street. “GOR, LUVVIE,” The Salty Old Nan Who Knew The Krays is saying, as you politely queue up in the Spar behind her. “NAH YOU GO AHEAD FIRST. ARR KNEW THE KRAYS.” Did you, Salty Old Kray Nan? Did you know the Krays? “YEAH. GOOD BOYS THEY WAS, GOOD BOYS. VO VEY DID AV A TEMPER.” Did you party with the Krays, Kray Nan? Did you… you know? “WON’T SAY A BAD WORD ABAAT THEM BOYS. THEY LOVED THEIR MOTHER.” OK, Kray Nan. Well, it was nice to see you. “YOU WATCH YOURSELF ON VEM STREETS.” Is that a thread, Kray Nan? “ALL’S I’M SAYIN. ALL’S I’M SAYIN. GOD BLESS YOU, DARLIN.” Okay, Kray Nan, thank you. So in answer to your question, the only fucking thing to do in Forest Gate is try not to get fucking battered by someone’s hard grandma.
Alright, how much are they asking? £800 pcm.

AUTHOR’S NOTE, FEATURING A CHEERFUL ADMISSION OF NAIVETY: I made a horrible realisation about this flat while writing this piece that will be addressed in Point #6. To avoid a full re-write, and to show you my thinking as I go along, I will preserve the order of my observations as I made them, so you can see the exact moment I realised The Thing. I’ll mark where my thoughts were interrupted by realisation with a random word-pair I took from wordcounter.net. That word-pair is “SOUP BROTHER”. First, the photos.  

Then, the things. Before The Realisation, I felt there were five notable points about this flat, but I was wrong – but you’ll see how I was right before I was wrong. So: 

1. The sofa downstairs – ironwork latticed at the back and the sides, because everyone knows that’s the most comfortable way to make a sofa, out of fucking metal – isn’t a sofa at all, it’s a sofa-bed, because it has a mattress on it (like a bed) but also has a back (like a sofa), making it both a sofa and a bed. This is bad, I think. It is bad not because the sofa is the kind of strange weatherproof furniture your parents have in their garden, but because it was a bed, once, and it could be a bed again. Even if you live in the flat alone – and, with the space available to you, I really would suggest you do – it does not expel the ghost of the bed being a sofa: every time you sit on it, uncomfortable and facing your own armchair, you think, ‘This used to be someone’s bed. My sofa… is actually someone’s bed.’ As pieces of furniture go, it is, top-to-bottom, very bad vibes. 

2. The door to the kitchen (the kitchen is underneath your bed) is not a full-sized door. So either it’s a door that’s been sawn down to the height of the mezzanine above it, or it’s a full-sized door that is obstructed by the shelf that intersects the room, and both of those options are entirely cursed ways of getting into a kitchen.

3. The positioning of the washing machine and the fridge suggests you cannot open the washing machine fully without moving the fridge; the positioning of the work surface atop the fridge is less than 50 percent the depth of the fridge itself; the positioning of the ladder up to the mezzanine shelf is obstructed by the wardrobe, so you have to clamber over and around your wardrobe to get up there after clambering around your fridge to take the socks out of the washing machine. Nothing in this flat interconnects with anything else. Everything has been designed and placed there interdependently. There is no order, no common language. This is like if the Tower of Babel took a severe knock to the head – one of those bad bruises, the ones that fill slowly with deep dark blood, your head a stone fruit slowly leaking juice – then tried to design a compact kitchen. Unideal. 

4. There are two separate sections of the kitchen tiling where whoever tiled the kitchen simply gave up: first, the black-and-white patterned tiling, which stops halfway around the room, from R to L; secondly, the decorative band, which just runs out and turns into splintered fragments of some other tiles. The fridge sits on top of an ominous tiled hatch. Everything about this is primed to collapse. If this area has passed a fire safety test then fire safety tests don’t actually exist. They are just something you can print off the internet and get a teacher to sign. 

5. But mainly, the whole place seems tacked together from shit someone found in the street. Here’s an armchair, look: it’s opposite a soiled sofa-bed. Here’s a ladder, look: it goes up to a mezzanine shelf, which faces your too-enormous wardrobe. The kitchen has an odd fire door with a peephole window you might find on a spacecraft, and the wall outside it is decorated with an ominously placed four-strip electrical cord. A dangling metal lightbulb cage hovers past the ladder and into your front room. Your toilet is mounted at a severe angle compared to the rest of the—

SOUP BROTHER

— Okay, so here’s the realisation:

6. The iron sofa-bed is the bed. There are no other photos of the shelf above the flat that suggest a second bed lives on there. So what is on the shelf? Let’s look at this logically: there are only photos of the front room area (armchair, shelves, ladder, wardrobe, iron bed-frame that doubles as a sofa), plus the peering door that leads to the kitchen beyond it (fridge, black-white tiling, washing machine at acute angle), and then there is a photo of the ladder to the mezzanine shelf, and then there is a photo of one other room, which is the bathroom. So actually: 

It would appear that you climb up the ladder above your kitchen to get to your bathroom.

This is the whole flat. I am so used to mezzanine floors with mattresses flopped on them, I just assumed that the shelf in this room would house a bed. But it doesn’t. It houses a bathroom. Is that worse? It feels worse. It feels like sleeping on a mattress on an iron garden sofa in a front room through a hacked-together fire door leading to a half-finished kitchen, all perilously located beneath a bathroom, which has an insanely mounted toilet in it and 500 clashing patterns of tile and is mounted inexpertly and heavy directly above your bed and kitchen and all the electrical and water supply lines that feed all that: that feels, and I didn’t think it was possible, that feels worse than just having a mattress above there.

Fucking hell. A whole new low. A mezzanine floor just to house your toilet. This cursed city is beyond repair. 

@joelgolby