For the past 11 years, I've lived in a basement suite. There's a lot I like about it - the rent is EXCESSIVELY reasonable, I've got a good relationship with the landlord, it's situated near a Skytrain stop and is also walking distance to a grocery store, a public library, and a rec centre. It's also relatively easy to keep cool with just fans in the summer (although last year I sprung for a window AC unit and have possibly never enjoyed the use of a purchase more in my life). Lots of storage space, too.

There are drawbacks, of course. I share space with a roommate, and while we're both pretty quiet people who're good friends and good at cohabiting, if either of us has even one other person over to hang out it very quickly becomes apparent how little excess space there is. The kitchen is tiny, with a truly minuscule amount of counter space. It gets pretty cold in the winter. If people are making noise upstairs, we hear it. The bathroom sink drips and the hot water in it has basically no pressure, and the last time the landlord tried to fix it he just made it worse so we just make do.

Those are all more specific drawbacks, however. The more commonly-experienced basement suite living drawback, and the subject of this post, is Dankness. Understand that I don't refer to dankness with any positive connotations - I'm talking about the way basement suites can be dark, dusty, smelly, and/or creepy. Basement suite dankness can be pronounced, but it can also sneak up on you in any number of ways.

I'm not here to give an exhaustive rundown of everything you should personally be doing in order to have a perfect gleaming Influencer Apartment. Regardless of how successful you might be in doing so, presumably everyone reading this at least KNOWS about doing dishes and vacuuming and scrubbing your toilet and so on. What I'd like to focus on are some of the less-immediately-apparent ways I keep the space from looking and feeling dank, with an eye towards both how effective they are and how much extra trouble they can be.