Apartment hunting, part 1
Jul. 22nd, 2013 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_lucy21Since this is the first time in my adult life where I don't have to find a place to live within 60 days, I'm taking my time with the apartment hunting.
I drove through a handful of apartment complexes that are fairly close to work. They mostly looked pretty nice, which may make them out of my price range, but maybe not (I haven't looked yet, but closer to work is likely to be in more expensive neighborhoods). On one hand, close to work would be really nice. On the other hand, those neighborhoods aren't all that close to my gym, church, where I do volunteer tutoring- okay, well, nothing I rent is going to be near where I do tutoring. Aside from the fact that I promised Mom I'd move into a "safe" neighborhood (our definitions of safe are a little different. Mine is mostly "is anyone shooting at me? No? Okay, I'm probably safe". Hers is a bit more stringent), the area where I do tutoring is even further away from work than I'm living now and at least half of my reason for moving out of the house is so that I'm not so freakin' far away from work. But I'd like to not be halfway across town from tutoring, since I'm there two nights a week, and I'm usually pretty tired when I get out of there.
But I'll probably look into at least two or three of the places I drove through, because at least a couple of them looked like they either had a lot of ground level units or were all ground level units and that's priority number one on my list of apartment requirements, unless the building has an elevator, and most apartment complexes around here don't have elevators.
(Priorities, for my future reference:
1. Ground floor with minimal steps to the front door.
2. Air conditioning
3. No more than 20 minutes from work, preferably no more than 20 minutes from the gym, church, tutoring, where my knitting group meets, but those are more flexible.
4. Assigned parking, or at least plentiful parking by the unit, preferably covered in some fashion
5. Washer/Dryer or W/D hookups
Also, really high preference for hard floors over carpet, but around here, that's not likely)
I drove through a handful of apartment complexes that are fairly close to work. They mostly looked pretty nice, which may make them out of my price range, but maybe not (I haven't looked yet, but closer to work is likely to be in more expensive neighborhoods). On one hand, close to work would be really nice. On the other hand, those neighborhoods aren't all that close to my gym, church, where I do volunteer tutoring- okay, well, nothing I rent is going to be near where I do tutoring. Aside from the fact that I promised Mom I'd move into a "safe" neighborhood (our definitions of safe are a little different. Mine is mostly "is anyone shooting at me? No? Okay, I'm probably safe". Hers is a bit more stringent), the area where I do tutoring is even further away from work than I'm living now and at least half of my reason for moving out of the house is so that I'm not so freakin' far away from work. But I'd like to not be halfway across town from tutoring, since I'm there two nights a week, and I'm usually pretty tired when I get out of there.
But I'll probably look into at least two or three of the places I drove through, because at least a couple of them looked like they either had a lot of ground level units or were all ground level units and that's priority number one on my list of apartment requirements, unless the building has an elevator, and most apartment complexes around here don't have elevators.
(Priorities, for my future reference:
1. Ground floor with minimal steps to the front door.
2. Air conditioning
3. No more than 20 minutes from work, preferably no more than 20 minutes from the gym, church, tutoring, where my knitting group meets, but those are more flexible.
4. Assigned parking, or at least plentiful parking by the unit, preferably covered in some fashion
5. Washer/Dryer or W/D hookups
Also, really high preference for hard floors over carpet, but around here, that's not likely)