Apartment Hunt: Part 5

July 15th, 2006

Webomatica After spending the past three weekends driving in circles around the East Bay and San Francisco, we put down a deposit on a 2 bedroom apartment in San Mateo. It’s within walking distance to downtown, with its restaurants, shopping, and movie theaters, plus the all-important CalTrain station. It will shave about ten minutes off both our commutes each way, which isn’t awesome but adds up over time.

The new pad has hardwood floors, a decent sized kitchen (with dishwasher), and two bedrooms bigger than our current one. I’d say in all it’s about 1/3 bigger than our current place. We definitely don’t have enough furniture to fill it. The building is a ten unit deal, looking onto a garden courtyard. It also has a covered garage with additional storage.

The rest of the story is that we abandoned the East Bay. We had several places in the Grand Lake / Temescal / Adams Point area lined up for today, but a co-worker’s friend sent me an interesting email about how he and his partner moved away from there because of car jackings, armed robbery, and a daytime rape. Other coworkers had semi-amusing stories about a woman who’s dog was killed and people getting mugged as they were leaning over to put groceries in a car, etc. The added stress just didn’t sound worth it.

We still had our heart set on Alameda but unfortunately didn’t find anything for us within our budget and time frame. I guess that’s a carrot held out for another move.

So we move next week, and since we don’t have to be out of here until the first of August, there’s some overlap when we can get our stuff together and clean up over the next two weekends. I’m excited for a slightly different change of pace, although not looking forward to the annoying task of changing all the addresses on our utilities and such.

Glad to put a rest to this Apartment Hunt series; that’s for sure.

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