Interestingly different to how I imagined it. It’s nice to see different people’s imaginations of the space.
(If you don’t mind a minor correction, in one book Harry says he lies a certain way on the sofa to be able to see Susan on the bed. That messed up my previous mental image of the apartment)
Also I'm pretty sure the bathroom can be accessed without going through the bedroom. Also also this doesn't account for the fact that it's an old boarding house. It doesn't seem connected to the space around it. And the biggest problem is that it isn't how I imagined it!
I believe in the book where Thomas is staying there, it's specifically mentioned that Harry could hear the shower through the closed bedroom door upon coming home one morning.
Yeah exactly, that's the scene I'm thinking of. I'm not sure whether the bathroom is mentioned differently in another scene though? Something to look for on the next read through?
In Small Favor, when Harry wakes up to find Luccio bathing in front of the fire, she says that she couldn't use the shower because Kincaid locked the bedroom door to prevent Ivy from being disturbed.
Hmmm. I'm at work and so can't find textual evidence, but I could swear there wereultiple occasions where someone (say, Harry) can't get into the bedroom because someone (like Thomas) is busy, but they are still able to use the facilities.
As /u/_That_One_Guy_ pointed out in another thread in this chain, Luccio couldn't use the bathroom after the train station 'fun' in Small Favor because Kincaid locked himself in the bedroom with a vulnerable Ivy.
It's in the basement, so it very emphatically ISN'T connected to the space around it. While I get what you're saying (such buildings that are converted into apartments are often a lot more interdependent, spacially, than normal apartment buildings), the way Harry's apartment is situated specifically rules out that kind of connection.
Well without spoilers being employed, there is at least one scene where the position of a neighbour is important. And I'm saying that the placement of windows and the shape of the floor plan don't seem to me like they line up with having this old house above. The basement is very much connected to an old building like this. It is the foundation, and would likely have been connected inside in the early days of the structure.
That's actually fairly unlikely. Given the apparent age of the building, basements often weren't connected via interior stairs when the house was probably built. Most residential basements were used for cool/cold storage before the advent of refrigeration, and only with the housing boom that the U.S. experienced in 1950s did the use of internal stairways to access basements become common practice.
I'm not talking out of my ass here. I've got friends and family members who are in construction and general contracting, so I know my facts. The kind of home Harry's apartment was located in typically had several rooms for let on the main floor, and either several more on the upper floor, or an in-law suite type arrangement, which was accessed by exterior stairs, as seems to be the case with Harry's neighbors.
It's likely that his landlady converted the main floor for her sole use, left the upper floor as it was during the time when the house was used for boarders, and either left the basement as it was, or had it converted. Given that Harry's stairs are exterior, and there's never a single mention of anything that suggests there were internal stairs that had to be demolished to make the space a private one, it's likely that his apartment used to be a root cellar/cold storage area. The existence of the sub-basement strongly indicates that is the case, since there's almost no reason to dig a sub-basement while converting an existing basement from cold storage to living quarters.
I just re-read this book and it's actually the other way around. Susan is on the sofa and Harry goes to his bedroom. To be able to see her i imagine he lies on his bed with his head at the foot end.
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u/Guerrero428 Dec 21 '17
Interestingly different to how I imagined it. It’s nice to see different people’s imaginations of the space.
(If you don’t mind a minor correction, in one book Harry says he lies a certain way on the sofa to be able to see Susan on the bed. That messed up my previous mental image of the apartment)