Yep, we’ve been in California for about a month now. I know. I’m too far behind on blogging to even think about what I’m missing. But that’s probably a good thing for you.
First off–yes! We found a place! When we first made it to CA we stayed a few days with our good friends Austin and Emily. They were nice enough to let us take over their living room for a while. After three days of seeing dump after overpriced dump, we went to see the last one on our list. It was a couple hundred less than most the others we had looked at. As Devin got out to take a look he said, “I’m not even sure why we are wasting our time with this place.” There was no way it could be even halfway decent at the price it was. But he came back saying I had to take a look at it. I braced myself for scum, grime, and bugs.
Not even close. Brand new carpet. Clean. New paint. Clean. Well maintained. Clean. No stupid sliding doors in the bath tub. Clean.
Did I mention it was clean? It was crazy. We saw a couple other places that we considered but when there was a $200 difference, there was no question about it. We had found our place.
Want a tour?
That’ll have to wait for another day. I might need to tidy up a bit. But I’ll tell you a little about it.
It’s a two bedroom, one full bath. It has a good size living room with a balcony off of it which lets in a lot of light. The kitchen is a decently sized. And by that I mean it has a full size dishwasher. It has tile counter tops which I’m not a fan of but I’ll take that over the painted counter tops we saw in another apartment. Covered parking. Small outside storage. A pool (clean and well kept, though not heated). The coin-op laundry room is just a few steps from the bottom of our stairs. I know…coin-op. Yuck. But we just couldn’t justify what seemed to be a $500/month difference to have a washer and dryer in our apartment. But the set up we have is next best. I can do laundry while Katelyn naps because I can see if there is anyone heading towards our apartment from the laundry room.
The location is pretty good, too. Though it’s not walking distance to much like we wanted, there is a park that I can walk to. Also, there is pretty much anything within a five minute drive. Safeway, Arby’s, the bank…what else do you need? Devin’s work is about a 12 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to a shuttle bus which makes it so we don’t have to buy a second car. Yay for us!
So not completely what we wanted but when you only have a few days to find a place, I’d say we did pretty good. We have a 6-month lease but I’m guessing we will stay longer than that.
So welcome home to us. Ah, finally somewhere to call home.