Jesse’s place is a pretty good value for the location near downtown Asheville, but it’s nothing special. Basically just a clean place to crash for a night. With a few minor and inexpensive fixes, it could be way better. Jesse has a nice large screen television in the space and it was a cold night, so I was just going to watch a movie from his extensive DVD collection. I put four DVDs in the player and none of them would load, so I just gave up and watched some tube. The kitchen space has basically nothing for you to use. There’s a coffee maker and microwave, but only a few plates and couple of bowls. No cups, flatware, cutlery...nothing. I ended up drinking water from one of the bowels. Just some basic stuff would be nice along with something to clean it up with. There was a cup-looking/vase-looking thing by the sink but it had some kind of nasty brown liquid in the bottom, so I left it alone. There is a small apartment refrigerator. Take-away is, don’t come here expecting to prepare any food, because there’s nothing to do that with unless you bring your own utensils and, even then, good luck washing them. I mean, why have a coffee maker if there are not even any coffee cups?!
My biggest problem was that I had trouble sleeping in this place, because there’s no control over the heat and air and the heater blasts the place to hot, then it cools off, then blasts again, etc. I ended up covering and peeling off the bed sheet all night long. The bed has one sheet plus a VERY warm comforter, so there’s no in-between. The heater is noticeably loud, but not something to keep you awake or wake you unless you’re a very light sleeper. There is an overhead ceiling fan and a box fan and I suppose I could have tried experimenting with them to regulate the temperature, but at some point you just want to try and sleep. I suspect the place is hot in the summer due to the western exposure and only one floor vent, so beware of that. It was only relatively dark in the bedroom, even with the curtains covering the windows and I had to rig a way to close the gap between the curtains so the street lighting wouldn’t shine in. Beyond that, the wiring of the place is a bit scary, IMO. Lots of old extension cords running about and one outlet next to the bed didn’t seem to want to work properly to allow the lamp to turn on. I was basically okay with the space as far as cleanliness, quietness and convenience of location, but the difficulty of thermoregulation was my biggest complaint.
One other thing...locking the door to leave is not especially intuitive and no directions were left in the apartment. I didn’t want to bother the host to figure out how to lock the door. You have to enter the code Jesse gave you while standing outside and then turn the deadlock counter clockwise to bolt the deadlock after/while the locking mechanism has activated. Also, don’t forget to turn on the porch light if you leave at night, because the numbers on the keypad don’t light up.