Simply could not remember to blog about our first attempt at finding a place to live. Then again, I’ve only got a few photos and none are actually of the insides of any of the places. Oops. Our first day of hunting was Friday. Matt’s work paid for a relator to help us find a place which sounds great but, yeah. Having someone else try to pick out a place for you, having not asked many questions other than how many bedrooms, if you have pets, and your budget doesn’t work so well.
We saw five complexes and none were what we wanted. All were big, fancy corporate places with amenities and small apartments. We want lots of space and zero ammenities ’cause, really, who regularly uses the complex weight room? Plus every place we saw was way out of our price range. I get that she is trying to make money off of us picking a place but, come on. Here’s a few shots from those places.
Thankfully Craig’s List here had lots of listings. Matt sifted through listings for a few days and eventually narrowed it down to three places. One we never could get a visit scheduled so that’s off the list. The first place we visited is a townhouse right near Old Town Alexandria. It’s two bedrooms plus a full basement with wood floors. Downsides are no dishwasher and a tiny kitchen but Matt can easily use an attached sunroom for all kitchen storage and ingredient preparations. The second place is sort of in the middle of nowhere but a few blocks closer to the metro and very newly rennovated. It’s also got a much larger backyard and heated bathroom tiles (odd, huh?).
After a bit of talking, we decided to put in an application on the first townhouse which I just dropped off with he owner. Hopefully early next week we’ll hear if we got it and then can determine our move-in date. We’re really excited and see no reason the application won’t be accepted but there’s always that fear.
Good luck! We didn’t get the first apartment we wanted here – they wanted the school to pretty much hand over the deed to the school as collateral, which was obviously not going to happen.