Our Apartment

Our apartment building.

John and Elizabeth with a cat that has visited us.

Our temporary (summer) apartment is really nice.  It is a charming little apartment on the ground floor of a very upscale building that is literally across the street from Les Invalides (the palace that houses Napoleon’s tomb).  Our apartment opens onto a white stone patio the length of the building and there is a semi-circle garden beyond that with a black wrought iron fence surrounding the whole place.  The patio is the common entrance to all of the apartments in the building and there are two locked entrance gates in the fence, one on each side of the building. 

 

The view from our front door/window.

Our apartment looks like it is a portion of a larger apartment that was partitioned years ago.  All of the apartments have large windows facing the patio and garden with black wrought iron fenced-in balconies that fit flower boxes perfectly.  On the ground floor, the “balconies” are actually part of the patio.  Our front door is a glass door cut into our giant window.  Our fence has a gate in the middle of it that looks like it was cut from and attached back into the fence.  A couple other apartments look like they have been retrofitted similarly, but most of them seem like much larger apartments for families.

Our apartment is long and skinny.  The front door opens into a 15’x30’ living/dining room.  On the back side of that are Elizabeth’s bedroom on the left and the kitchen on the right, side-by-side, about 7’x10’ each.  Behind them is a hall to the bathroom on the left, and our bedroom on the right.  The back door is in the bedroom and clearly it was originally the front door.  It opens onto a courtyard that is accessible from the front patio via a main entrance that the other apartments use to get to them, and to get to the upstairs apartments.  The only two windows in our apartment are the front door and the window in the bedroom.

The living room, with Elizabeth's room and the kitchen behind.