When I first entered the Cove apartments to interview seniors Cass Dempwolf  and Olivia Siulagi, I was met by the comforting smell of bleach and faint Cove odor. This was not my first time here; I had stayed in Cove apartment 2 on a Wednesday night as a prospective student, when my brother was a Kenyon student and lived here for fire department housing. While not the most conventional example of apartment housing, Cass and Olivia showed me that this apartment above the Cove,  in spite of its rough exterior, has its own kind of charm.

“It’s like ’shitty college apartment chic’ –that’s kind of what we’re going for,” explained Cass, referring to a plank that had been propped up on two piles of books in the middle of the common room that served as a coffee table.

“For a while we wondered if we should make this place look classy, and then it was just like, ‘fuck it,” added Olivia, “So we decorated it with Cosmo. We have Miley Cyrus above our toilet. I don’t know, it’s fun.”

Thanks to Dempwolf and Siulagi, I was lucky enough to get a look at what life is like living above the Cove. Now that I have an understanding of things like “feral cats” and “Mac n Cheese wedges,” my interview with the Cove apartment’s residents was much more enlightening than when I slept on a futon in that same room during my prospy student days.

The day to day of living above the Cove is very much what you might expect. “The apartment shakes when the Cove is open,” said Cass.

The two have shaped their routine around Cove hours. “My room is above half of the kitchen, and half of the bar area so I don’t usually come in here before closing times,” Olivia explained. Cass started working at the Cove as a bartender there this year, and they have gotten to know the staff of the Cove pretty well. “[The Cove] has kind of become the center of our social life”

“Sometimes we joke about studying in the Cove,” admitted Olivia, to which Cass added that she does, on occasion, bring her laptop downstairs to get some food and do work.

 “There’s a lot of things in this apartment that are broken,” said Cass, “We’ve invented a Cove ghost because things in this apartment will randomly break. So we say it’s a drunken Cove ghost that stumbles around breaking things.”

 Sometimes living above the Cove means appreciating wildlife; “There’s a raccoon that lives around here, we named him Kanye because he’s an asshole,” Cass explained. “I love Kanye though,” Olivia added, “I saw him the other week out in front of the market eating out of a trashcan like it was no big deal. He’s been kind of MIA recently though.”

When I asked the two if they loved or hated their living arrangement, the response was immediate:

“I think I love it… We just decided not to take it too seriously, I mean we’re living above the Cove,” said Cass.

Olivia agreed; “We really shouldn’t take anything seriously. There are definitely days when I walk up those janky stairs and I think, ‘I love it.’”

If you want to see more of Olivia and Cass’s adventures and what it’s like to live above the Cove, you can check out the Facebook page they made for their apartment.