Home sweet home sweet homo
Yay me!
I found a place. After an exhausting search high and low, near and far, I stumbled upon a lovely place just a few blocks from where I live now. I won’t need to change dry cleaners; I can still stumble home from the Eagle, and since this place is on the 3rd floor of a walk-up, expect me to have an ass like a marble statue in no time at all.
There are a few drawbacks. There is no parking, however the building across the street has garage spaces available (maybe next month) and it was kind of a dump. Let me clarify. It was a dump. The former tenants were not the tidiest of people. They were, however, boozers, as exhibited by the fifty or so empty bottles of booze lining the area above the cupboards in the kitchen. The floors, once cleaned should be very nice. Currently, they suffer from several areas of black “goo” and other sundry items covering them. The bathtub is a lovely shade of brown.
The management company is going to paint and clean this place before I move in. I will do the same ensuring it is up to my anal retentive, compulsively clean requirements.
I get the keys next week.
So now the question is…
Should I go the trading spaces route and have an accent wall? I think not.
Moving sucks
I hate moving season. The very notion of having to box up my belongings and relocate to another space, re-paint my walls to white, paint my new walls away from white, make friends with someone that owns a truck (which usually means putting out), and convincing others that they should help me move the few pieces of furniture that I have all add up to a big fat headache.
I spent a portion of yesterday looking at apartments. Five apartments to be exact. I rode along with “The Apartment People”, a “free” service here in Chicago that lists and shows apartments. To her credit, she picked out 5 pretty good places that they were close to where I was looking to live. She showed me the perfect place (with a god awful color palette). This place had a garage with remote, 2 bedrooms, brand new kitchen, big fenced yard for Stella to run around in and the rent was reasonable. Then the landlord asked for a full month’s rent as a deposit for Stella. He asked for a $795.00 pet deposit! I told my apartment guide that I would take the place on 2 conditions, one being that he allow me to paint and the other that he make the pet deposit reasonable like $200-$250. He countered with half a month’s rent. So totally move-in cost to me would have been, and I’m bad with math, cause, well, math is hard, but my total move-in would be, 3 carry the 5 minus the 2 plus… $2,200 roughly. I told him he could shove that 2 grand, well, my guide did so much more diplomatically than I did.
So I settled on another place that is very nice, walking distance to Wendy’s, upstairs from a coffee shop, next door to a Hot Dog stand and across the street from both a CVS and a Sears. This apartment too would require close to $2100 in order to move in.
I don’t get it. Why is a full month’s rent as a deposit so damn important?
Alas, I came home and went back at the classifieds and found a few more apartments to look at today. These take dogs and have reasonable deposit requirements. No parking, but at this point, I?ll hunt down a garage at a later date.
Off to find a new abode.