Around 7:30 most nights in July, the sun drops low enough that it stops hitting our balcony like a heat lamp and starts glowing instead. That's when Sam carries out two glasses of iced tea, I bring the bowl of whatever fruit is going soft, and we squeeze ourselves into a space that is roughly three feet deep and six feet wide. Olive watches from the other side of the screen door with deep suspicion. This is the best hour of our day, and for our first summer here, we barely used it.
Why it sat empty for a year
When we moved in, the balcony was a bonus we bragged about to friends and then ignored. It faces west, so in the afternoon it gets brutal, direct sun. The railing was hot enough to make you yelp. We had one plastic chair the previous tenant left behind, and it wobbled.
So the balcony became a storage shelf. The box fan lived out there in spring. Empty plant pots collected rainwater. At one point there was a bag of recycling waiting for its trip down three flights of stairs. It wasn't a room; it was a closet without a door.
What changed was small. Last June I sat out there one evening to take a work call because the window AC unit was too loud inside, and I realized that after sunset it was the nicest spot in the apartment. The heat came off, the sky turned orange behind the buildings across the street, and I could hear somebody's radio down the block. I came back in and told Sam we were fixing the balcony.
What's out there now
We kept it intentionally sparse. In a space this small, every object either earns its spot or makes the whole thing feel like a junk drawer.
| Item | Roughly what we paid | Why it stays |
|---|---|---|
| Two folding bistro chairs | $45 for both, secondhand | They fold flat against the wall when we need to open the door fully |
| Small folding side table | $18 | Holds two drinks and a phone, nothing more |
| Solar string lights | $14 | No outlet out there, and no drilling allowed |
| Outdoor rug, 2x5 | $22 | Covers the rough concrete so bare feet are okay |
| Two seat cushions | $16 | Come inside every night so they don't get damp |
The string lights wrap around the railing with zip ties, which our building is fine with because nothing is screwed into the brick. The little solar panel sits in the corner that gets the most afternoon sun, which, on a west-facing balcony, is all of it. They come on by themselves around dusk, which feels like a tiny bit of magic every time.
The plants that survived
I've tried more plants out there than I'd like to admit. The ones that made it through the full afternoon blast are a pot of basil, a cherry tomato plant in a five-gallon bucket, and some rosemary that I think could survive the surface of the sun. Lettuce bolted within a week. A pretty fern I bought on impulse turned crispy before the weekend was over. Western sun is not for delicate things.
The basil is the real winner. I pinch off leaves for dinner most nights in summer, and the tomato plant is just starting to give us a handful of ripe ones every couple of days. It's not a garden. It's three pots. But walking outside to pick something for dinner makes me feel more put-together than I actually am.
How we keep it a habit
The hardest part wasn't furnishing the balcony. It was remembering to go out there. A few things helped:
- We keep the chairs unfolded all summer unless it storms. If you have to set something up, you won't.
- Phones stay inside, mostly. Sam is better at this than I am.
- Dishes can wait twenty minutes. We used to clean up right after dinner, and by the time we were done the nice light was gone. Now we go out first and wash up after.
- We bring the cushions in every night. It's a small ritual that signals the evening is over, and it keeps them from mildewing.
On the hottest days, when even 8 p.m. feels like an oven, we still go out for ten minutes. On cooler nights we can stay an hour, watching the light change on the brick across the street and talking about nothing. Some evenings a neighbor two balconies over waves. Once, a pigeon tried to move in and Olive nearly lost her mind.
For something that cost us a little over a hundred dollars, it's given us more than almost anything else in the apartment. It turns out we didn't need a bigger place. We needed to walk six feet past the door we already had.
