Consultant's Corner: A home of one’s own, Turkish style

The desire to move out of our apartment began the day we got the key, forty-eight hours before we wed in the spring of 2005. Unlocking the door for the first time, we surveyed the ugly carpeting and tried to be cheerful. Broken tiles? We put a rug over them. We made plans to, but never did, replace the tiny corner shower that would prove difficult to maneuver while pregnant, the cabinets with exposed particleboard, and the wallpaper haphazardly pasted and peeling of off moldy concrete walls. We lived with a mysterious smell for a year and a half that wafted from under the locked door of a bedroom in which our landlady stored her furniture and bags of unidentifiable things. We were in love and had lived in worse.

The rent was cheap because my in-laws knew the owner; we sat on pillows for a couple months and drank water out of gift-with-purchase Efes Pilsen glasses. There was the convenience of putting something in the elevator and having it sent down to us by my mother-in-law on the fifth floor, like meals, a coffee table, and curtains. I didn’t speak enough Turkish then to know how to describe what I actually wanted, and I didn’t know where to buy it. We decided to stay until we could take it no longer.

Brightly painted, our government-issue apartment building was one of many built starting in the late 1970’s and finished in the early 90’s. Affected by the earthquake in 1999, many of the sidewalks still had cracks, but all of the buildings had stood strong among the quakes. We had a post office within walking distance, a crop of corner markets and grocery stores, and fewer maniacal drivers than in other parts of Izmit. It was, we were told, a good place to raise children because of the number of nursery and elementary schools within walking distance.

Inspired buildings

The apartments themselves range from 2-3 bedrooms in either four or eight-story buildings. They typically have two balconies, no built-in closets except for one, and a galley kitchen. All of the rooms are rectangular. This poses problems for furniture arrangement, doubly so because the electrical outlets are often in inconvenient places. With inspiring building names labeled A, B, C, D, E, and F, and numbered 1-36, the layouts are nearly identical and built in such a way that only a couple walls are not carrier walls. Good for earthquakes, but not for renovation because you can’t knock down a wall to expand a room except in a couple places.

Our apartment had all-over reflective wallpaper that was probably once white or cream, but had faded to gray. I had never lived in an apartment that wasn’t full of color, so we bought bright red couches. We painted over the wallpaper of one room an unfortunate salmon color quite popular in Turkey. It is my professional opinion that the color salmon is unflattering to every skin tone and matches nothing. The other room fared better with a lime green on which I painted a menagerie of birds, clouds, and animals with their names in Turkish and English for my infant son. One day, with the balcony door open, a sparrow flew in and perched on the couch, fluttering its wings, and darting out the door again before I could grab the camera. That room is the only one I miss.

My mother-in-law is rather a matriarch of the old building we lived in. She tells me now that our former apartment owner has redone the walls, the kitchen counter, and replaced the tile. It sits unoccupied because now the rent is too high. We, on the other hand, have left the nest and are ecstatic about our freedom from moldy walls and poor color choices. We now live in an apartment we renovated from top to bottom, two blocks away.


Rose Deniz is an artist, designer and writer. She can be reached at rose@rosedeniz.com, www.rosedeniz.com.