Our four-month lease is up at the end of December, thank goodness. While renting a furnished sublet was a great way to find a place quickly and to not have to deal with buying furniture and other household items, we’ll be really glad to be moving to a place where:
1) we’re not forced to show our apartment in place of another, sometimes without warning, and then are told ours “doesn’t show well” with the bed out, and we should really move all our boxes from the bed storage area down to the basement, although we’ll be moving very soon
2) a surly cleaning girl won’t kick me out of my own home to take two hours to Swiffer the floors and Fantastick the bathroom
3) our bedroom, living room, and office won’t all be in one room.
We went to three open houses yesterday, and looked at six apartments. As always, we loved the first place we looked at. (The second was in the same building, cheaper but smaller.) Just two blocks away, the building used to be a residence for single working women (not THOSE kind of working women, like MB thought). The lobby is very pretty with ornate fixtures and stained glass windows.
The apartment itself is a real one bedroom with a billion closets. I can’t remember how many, at least three, maybe four. There are definitely two giant ones in the bedroom. Right now we have one small one, as we did in New York. Some NYC apartments don’t have closets at all.
The living room has bay windows, and everything is pristine. Very clean and brand new. The only downsides are that there’s no laundry in the building, though there are plenty in the area, and the kitchen is kind of small. But we both agreed: the moment we walked in, we thought, Wow! Plus the building managers seem really nice.
While we applied for that place, just to be sure we looked at a few more. The next open house was nearby. That was a no-brainer: the kitchen was part of the living room. No thanks! The next three places were in a building a little further out, in Pacific Heights near Fillmore Street. While the apartments were quite big for around the same price, everything looked very dingy and old. I asked if the walls and fixtures were being redone. Nope. I’d rather live in a smaller place that’s pristine than in a yucky somewhat bigger place.
Yucky how? The hardwood floors were scuffed up and stained in some places, the tiling in the bathroom looked used, and the fixtures in the kitchens looked like that cheap fake wood stuff that doesn’t handle water or stains well.
We’re keeping our fingers crossed about the first place, though if they don’t accept us, I don’t know what place will. Also, it’s available December 15 so we could overlap a couple of weeks and take our time moving our stuff in. That would really be ideal.
That sounds like fantastic good luck finding a good place on the first look! I’ve noticed the same about SF apartments, the ones in the nice parts of town tend to be older and dingier, or ridiculously expensive. And overlapping by a couple weeks would be so helpful! Keeping fingers crossed that you guys get the place :)