Just writing that headline invites disaster. Plumbing going bad a few floors above us, or a sudden breakdown of some of the appliances.

But (so far) the new digs here in Abu Dhabi are so much better than the old that a certain person living here has suggested “It’s like I actually began living in this country when I moved here.”

Let’s compare and contrast.

The old apartment was closer to the office. About four months of the year I could walk home at night in 20 minutes. There’s that.

It was within walking distance of Abu Dhabi’s three churches. A rubberized running track around Khalifa University, about 100 yards from our door, was helpful for exercise (in a country with a lot of broken pavement) for those same four months of the year that I walked home from work. And it came furnished, more or less. A bed. A TV, a couple of random tables. A pair of couches that were so hideous we replaced them almost instantly. In theory, we could have barbecued on the patio, but we never did.

The old place had two rooms. A living area (with kitchen against one wall) and the bedroom. Which is always key for two people, so one can sleep while the other does not. It worked in that sense.

A sort of park, about 40 yards deep, grass and scraggly local trees, ran next to the building. Sometimes it was nice to see some green — though we had to go to the eight-foot-high gate and open it to see it.

That is about it for attributes. Oh, and it was superior to where we lived the first year.

The old place had no view. It had three windows, but one opened on the patio, one opened on a view of the superintendent’s room (and, thus, was always closed), and the third opened on a junk-strewn corridor. And the “curtains” looked as if they had been measured by a guy without a tape measure and “sized” by eyeballing them with scissors in hand.

The other side of that green stretch, mentioned above, belonged to Airport Road, the busiest in the city.

The front door was half glass, and you could see out of it during the day, but anyone outside could see in at night. Granted, we were on the other side of a wooden wall (homes here are meant not to be seen into, which also means you often cannot see out), but the manager could walk through the passageways of the 16-to-20-unit place and be at our door.

We had three blowers for the air conditioner, and at least one seemed broken at any given time. The one in the bedroom was prone to leaking.

The oven could not be run at the same time as the washing machine. It always blew a fuse. So for three years we did not actually have an oven. We did not have a dryer for clothes. We did not have enough storage space.

The drains backed up fairly often. Especially in the kitchen but also in the bathroom. The “shower” was in a bathtub (a concept I hate) and the shower head could not be raised for someone taller than 5-foot-6.

Construction was always going on around us. First this villa, then the one next door, and we could hear conversations at all hours.

Also, the building is old. Very old, by Abu Dhabi standards; I’m going to say 20 years. Which is ancient, here, where sun and heat turn buildings ramshackle quickly.

It was just falling apart. It was not made well, and the roof sometimes leaked, and we were lucky it didn’t really rain the two years while we were there. (As opposed to the first year, when we were on the other side of the same building.)

And the neighborhood was too residential. The whole of the enormous block contained one gas station, one sad little grocery and a couple of banks. Not one restaurant. No real store. Getting anything involved a cab ride.

So. The new place.

Well, first, it’s new. It did not exist when we arrived here, in 2009. In fact, this is exactly the sort of modern “tower with amenities” that was exceeding rare in Abu Dhabi just a few years ago.

We have a gym and a pool up on the roof. On the ground floor, inside the same building, are amenities like a coffee shop (three of them, actually), a doughnut/ice cream shop and a barbershop. Dubai has a hundred, maybe hundreds of towers like this, but Abu Dhabi’s are just coming on line, most of them.

We have modern appliances. We have a standup shower and two toilets. We have entirely new furniture mostly purchased during one epic trip to Ikea. Things more or less match. (See photo below.)

And we have views; we are up above the older buildings across the road from us, and nearly the whole of the wall opposite the front door is given over to floor-to-ceiling glass.

We also have a big balcony that allows us to sit and admire the view, which extends to the islands north of us, or just see the water on the north side of the island, as well as the mangroves over there. If we turn to the left, we can see the skyline of downtown — as in the photo at the top of this entry, a photo taken from the balcony.

It does feel like a different life. Jobs unchanged, but housing massively changed. We are paying about 15 percent more. But so far it seems worth it.

After living here for a couple of weeks, to think back to the old place is to concede that it was about as close to camping … or living in a motel inside a cave … as one could get without actually camping or living in a motel inside a cave.

Maybe something will go horrible wrong soon. If it doesn’t, the improvement in quality of life is way more than the 15 percent we paid to make the change.