Stalking the Wily Rental

Now that the wedding and the honeymoon have come and gone, the next Big Step has arrived: finding a place to live after our leases run out at the end of November.

The original plan was to buy a house. That plan got scrapped as soon as we realized how much else we'd be dealing with in these early autumn months. M is against the notion of moving into an apartment (I can take 'em or leave 'em), so we've begun looking for houses to rent. This past Sunday, we made calls and made appointments to see four houses that afternoon, plus an appointment to see a house on Tuesday.

The first house was right up my alley. Electrical sockets everywhere. A finished basement with not one, but two cable jacks in the wall - one for TV and the other for a cable modem. The master bedroom had a remote control for the ceiling fan and light. There were skylights in the upstairs hall and bathroom (translucent skylights, not windows - no peeping toms around this joint!) The kitchen had tons of counter space and a built-in cookbook holder. It looked great to me, but the location was lousy. Not convenient to either of our jobs. Although, nothing is really convenient to my job, being as my office is 60 miles away. It also seemed, I don't know, too modern in the architecture.

The next house was just like the first one, only without all the gadgets and with sky-blue siding. Next.

House #3 had a better location to both our jobs, but all of the houses in the neighborhood were brown. I got flashbacks to the apartments near my house back when I was a kid in the 70's. It all had too much of a lava lamp vibe to me. But, assuming I could get over that, the house was acceptable.

On our way to house #4, we drove past the house we'd be seeing on Tuesday. Old-style rowhouse. Nice-looking neighborhood. Convenient to the major highways. We decided to keep the appointment.

House #4 was more or less in the woods. Most of the houses on that street were rich-people houses, but this one had a bit of an old cabin vibe to it, though most of the appliances were brand-new. There's no mail service in that area (except for the high-falootin' judge up the hill), so you have to go to the local post office to pick up your mail. The guy renting out the house tried to make that seem like a good thing. Gotta give him credit for trying. He seemed very desperate to get the house rented out.

Finally on Tuesday, we went to see house #5. The walls were painted in nice colors (though M is not crazy about the red bathroom), as opposed to all the white we'd been seeing. It has a deck. The closet space is a bit limited, but there are tons of cabinets in the basement. And it reminded me of the house my brother, a friend, and I rented back in the mid-90's. This was no doubt due to it having an almost identical floor plan (except that the upstairs hallway on this house is more spacious). I loved that house. M loves this house. So we seem to have reached an agreement on which house to rent. We just gotta make sure we get it before someone else does.

If all goes well, we'll be moving around November 1!