apartment hunting in SF.
In the evans vs. january contest, we're winning, but January is putting up a serious fight. Only 12 more rounds, er, days.
We spent the first week of January in NY, then drove home and flew west to find a place to live. Our first flight with Ian: 4 am getup, 6 hour flight, 8-day stay, two laptops. We had more luggage than I've ever traveled with.
Anyway, apartment hunting in the big city. We had one week to find a place to live. We pored over craigslist a few times a day, and made appointments to see as many places as we could when I got out of work.
Here's your best friend if you're apartment hunting in an unfamiliar city: the Garmin 2620. It's a dashboard GPS. Plug it into your cigarette lighter, drop it on the dash, and tell it where to take you. It holds the entire US in it at once (microdrive), so you never have to load maps. The interface isn't perfect and they run around $800 but still, what a great tool. Some friends lent us theirs and I don't know what we would have done without it -- we were sprinting around town, with a baby, hitting appointments at half-hour intervals, on time.
I guess renting was pretty ugly in San Francisco a few years ago, but it's lightened up a bit. It turns out there are a lot of nice apartments available, depending on the tradeoffs you're willing to make. The variables are the obvious ones (neighborhood, size, price, niceness) and then a few others (parking, washer/dryer, dishwasher).
We wanted neighborhood (baby-friendly) and size (we're moving from a suburban house, so all we can hope to do is minimize the storage bill), and we were hoping for parking, a washer/dryer, and a dishwasher. In the end, we got all of those things, trading the others: rent is more than our current mortgage, and this place isn't nearly as nice as some of the renovated Victorians we saw.
I hate renting. As soon as we started applying for places, I remembered that. I hate having a landlord, and I hate not being able to improve a place as I see fit. Bradee and I walked around our new place, noting the half-ass landlord-isms throughout, and agreed that with a few years we could make that apartment really beautiful. Homeownership has taught us a lot about what you can do to nice a place up.
The irony is that it's unlikely we'll be able to afford a place of our own in San Francisco. It's insanely expensive. We're talking million-dollar fixer-uppers. But I guess it depends on neighborhood; maybe we'll be able buy in the Sunset or the Richmond, if we like living in San Francisco proper.
So. Our house is sold. We signed a lease. We have movers scheduled for our house and car. We have storage lined up. We have one-way plane tickets to California. Whoa.