progress
We saw seven houses yesterday. Seven. Same number as the Von Trapp children, a meaningless fact I haven't been able to get out of my head all day.
Liesl - another place managed by the same guy who's handling the place we decided we wanted a couple of weeks ago and the big Victorian that has no a/c. This is a smallish well-cared-for rambler with a decent basement in a neighborhood we like a lot, but we both came away feeling like we really wished we liked it better than we did. It had the same general issue as my current apartment, really, which is an almost total lack of closet space - so we'd have to have furniture in place in order to put things away in, which would compromise the square footage a lot, and we'd spend the next two years stepping around the corners of things as I've been doing for the past five years and we thought it might get on our nerves in a hurry.
Friedrich - just one neighborhood away, a Craigslist listing that we liked a lot. Better than the original too-big place in a sketch-adjacent neighborhood, even! This place is actually pretty close to the LDS temple, so to distinguish it from Liesl we've been calling it the Mormon house.
Luisa - oh, gracious. This place looked pretty nice in the listing and was actually out of our price range, but it's been sitting vacant since Christmas and we thought if we liked it they might come down a bit in the interest of having something rather than nothing. So yeah - no. There was a sign on the door saying the place was undergoing major improvements and would be ready for new tenants "soon". (I repeat: vacant for months.) Some of the improvements were ugly and some were half-assed and some were just not improvements - suffice it to say, Himself didn't even take notes on the place. We snarked about it for a bit and put it in the "right out" file.
Kurt - only a couple of streets away, but in much better shape. We liked the kitchen particularly, and there was a shit-ton of closet space (including one closet that I swear had another smaller closet door at the back - I said "hang on, I'm going to Narnia" and opened it, but it was just covering the, like, fuse box) and good-sized rooms. The location is a little further out than we'd hoped for - we could do it, but we'd be happier being closer to things (including work; my commute from this place would be about twice as long as it is now, boo). Also, the walls had been freshly primed, but no fooling, all the non-wall painted surfaces in the whole place had been painted a very pale pink - off white toward pink, I mean, but once you noticed it was pink you just couldn't un-see it. The trim, the doors, the balusters, everything. God bless Kurt! We have inevitably taken to calling this place the pink house, and it is a strong second-place contender. (We would insist on being allowed to paint.)
Brigitta - also far out in the suburbs, so the location isn't really for us, though the setting of this house was lovely; there's undeveloped woodedness right behind it and I swear to god an old-fashioned gas lamppost in the back yard just before the edge of the woods. I can't tell you how much I wish I could decide to live in that house based on the lamppost alone. The house was meh - okay, but didn't really suit us, and the distance is disappointing, but I love the lamppost. Himself said we can get a lamppost when we get the right house in the future. ♥
Marta - this was a house I adored, an old brick place that had been well taken care of and already had colors I liked on the walls (see: Fox is susceptible to her environment) and was in a location we both liked better than the miles-away stuff, right here in the southern part of the county very close to the city line - except it's on a major traffic artery and we would seriously never get out of the driveway (and on his motorcycle he'd never get out safely). Seriously, the actual situation of the thing was bad enough to knock the place, though I loved and he liked the house (in trying to describe my sudden overwhelming affinity for the place I taught him the word gemütlich), down to bronze medal position.
Gretl - we mainly went to this one because the agent had been trying to get in and see it for a long time, and we thought we'd give it a chance to impress us. The backyard and the master suite did, but the rest of it left us feeling meh. It outranks the "right out" place, but is not a house we're considering.
We decided we liked the Mormon house best - enough better than the pink house that we would find a way to deal with the fact that the pink house is available now and the Mormon house isn't available until July 1 and I've given notice at my building that I'll be moving out June 1. We thought Okay, it's not yet the end of April, maybe they haven't rented my place yet, in which event I can ask if I can have 30 more days; worst case, they say no, and we make some sort of arrangement to put my stuff in storage and I camp at Himself's place for the month of June. That wouldn't be ideal, because at his place we'd be more on top of each other than we'd like (which is why we're looking for something else), plus I'd be out of a suitcase and without any of my stuff; but I'll be gone for a week in the middle of the month visiting my mom for reasons anyway, and that's how much better we like the Mormon house and its location. But if it doesn't work out at all with the Mormon house we can be happy in the pink house for a couple of years and start looking for a house to buy that is as much like the brick Marta house as we can get, but a block or so away for sanity reasons.
So today I stopped by the leasing office to explain the situation and ask if I could have another 30 days - and found that the notice I'd put in three weeks ago hadn't been entered into the system. In fact they had no record of it. Fortunately I have a record of it, so if I had tried to leave on June 1 I'd have been able to brandish my copy of the document and prove that I didn't owe them another month's rent - but in this case it actually worked to my advantage, because they can't possibly have already rented my apartment for June if their computer didn't even realize it was available. (Turns out that when I handed in the thing where I checked the box saying I was not renewing my lease and would be leaving as of June 1, and asked for a copy of it, what the guy put in the file was a copy of the cover letter. The first couple-few weeks were not auspicious for the new office staff; the guy I saw today acknowledged they had had a lot of damage control to do from what the old staff left them. Fun times!) Now I have a pink copy of a triple-carbon official form that is signed and witnessed and I'm good here until July 5.
We have the application and the credit reports and hopefully I will have a new address and an as-of date sooon.
Liesl - another place managed by the same guy who's handling the place we decided we wanted a couple of weeks ago and the big Victorian that has no a/c. This is a smallish well-cared-for rambler with a decent basement in a neighborhood we like a lot, but we both came away feeling like we really wished we liked it better than we did. It had the same general issue as my current apartment, really, which is an almost total lack of closet space - so we'd have to have furniture in place in order to put things away in, which would compromise the square footage a lot, and we'd spend the next two years stepping around the corners of things as I've been doing for the past five years and we thought it might get on our nerves in a hurry.
Friedrich - just one neighborhood away, a Craigslist listing that we liked a lot. Better than the original too-big place in a sketch-adjacent neighborhood, even! This place is actually pretty close to the LDS temple, so to distinguish it from Liesl we've been calling it the Mormon house.
Luisa - oh, gracious. This place looked pretty nice in the listing and was actually out of our price range, but it's been sitting vacant since Christmas and we thought if we liked it they might come down a bit in the interest of having something rather than nothing. So yeah - no. There was a sign on the door saying the place was undergoing major improvements and would be ready for new tenants "soon". (I repeat: vacant for months.) Some of the improvements were ugly and some were half-assed and some were just not improvements - suffice it to say, Himself didn't even take notes on the place. We snarked about it for a bit and put it in the "right out" file.
Kurt - only a couple of streets away, but in much better shape. We liked the kitchen particularly, and there was a shit-ton of closet space (including one closet that I swear had another smaller closet door at the back - I said "hang on, I'm going to Narnia" and opened it, but it was just covering the, like, fuse box) and good-sized rooms. The location is a little further out than we'd hoped for - we could do it, but we'd be happier being closer to things (including work; my commute from this place would be about twice as long as it is now, boo). Also, the walls had been freshly primed, but no fooling, all the non-wall painted surfaces in the whole place had been painted a very pale pink - off white toward pink, I mean, but once you noticed it was pink you just couldn't un-see it. The trim, the doors, the balusters, everything. God bless Kurt! We have inevitably taken to calling this place the pink house, and it is a strong second-place contender. (We would insist on being allowed to paint.)
Brigitta - also far out in the suburbs, so the location isn't really for us, though the setting of this house was lovely; there's undeveloped woodedness right behind it and I swear to god an old-fashioned gas lamppost in the back yard just before the edge of the woods. I can't tell you how much I wish I could decide to live in that house based on the lamppost alone. The house was meh - okay, but didn't really suit us, and the distance is disappointing, but I love the lamppost. Himself said we can get a lamppost when we get the right house in the future. ♥
Marta - this was a house I adored, an old brick place that had been well taken care of and already had colors I liked on the walls (see: Fox is susceptible to her environment) and was in a location we both liked better than the miles-away stuff, right here in the southern part of the county very close to the city line - except it's on a major traffic artery and we would seriously never get out of the driveway (and on his motorcycle he'd never get out safely). Seriously, the actual situation of the thing was bad enough to knock the place, though I loved and he liked the house (in trying to describe my sudden overwhelming affinity for the place I taught him the word gemütlich), down to bronze medal position.
Gretl - we mainly went to this one because the agent had been trying to get in and see it for a long time, and we thought we'd give it a chance to impress us. The backyard and the master suite did, but the rest of it left us feeling meh. It outranks the "right out" place, but is not a house we're considering.
We decided we liked the Mormon house best - enough better than the pink house that we would find a way to deal with the fact that the pink house is available now and the Mormon house isn't available until July 1 and I've given notice at my building that I'll be moving out June 1. We thought Okay, it's not yet the end of April, maybe they haven't rented my place yet, in which event I can ask if I can have 30 more days; worst case, they say no, and we make some sort of arrangement to put my stuff in storage and I camp at Himself's place for the month of June. That wouldn't be ideal, because at his place we'd be more on top of each other than we'd like (which is why we're looking for something else), plus I'd be out of a suitcase and without any of my stuff; but I'll be gone for a week in the middle of the month visiting my mom for reasons anyway, and that's how much better we like the Mormon house and its location. But if it doesn't work out at all with the Mormon house we can be happy in the pink house for a couple of years and start looking for a house to buy that is as much like the brick Marta house as we can get, but a block or so away for sanity reasons.
So today I stopped by the leasing office to explain the situation and ask if I could have another 30 days - and found that the notice I'd put in three weeks ago hadn't been entered into the system. In fact they had no record of it. Fortunately I have a record of it, so if I had tried to leave on June 1 I'd have been able to brandish my copy of the document and prove that I didn't owe them another month's rent - but in this case it actually worked to my advantage, because they can't possibly have already rented my apartment for June if their computer didn't even realize it was available. (Turns out that when I handed in the thing where I checked the box saying I was not renewing my lease and would be leaving as of June 1, and asked for a copy of it, what the guy put in the file was a copy of the cover letter. The first couple-few weeks were not auspicious for the new office staff; the guy I saw today acknowledged they had had a lot of damage control to do from what the old staff left them. Fun times!) Now I have a pink copy of a triple-carbon official form that is signed and witnessed and I'm good here until July 5.
We have the application and the credit reports and hopefully I will have a new address and an as-of date sooon.