Day Three - Thursday: Hope, Offer, Despair
(Part One: The Hunt Begins)
The third day of the trip began with high anticipation of a complimentary continental breakfast, courtesy of the Opal hotel in San Francisco. This anticipation was immediately followed by a crushing disappointment when we realized that the "continental breakfast" consisted simply of bread, jam, and juice.
Over breakfast I checked craigslist and Metrorent.com on my iPhone to see if there were any new listings. One promising lead presented itself--a place in Inner Sunset, with a contact number for "James." I called and asked to view the apartment as soon as possible, which translated into being 45 min. from the time of the phone-call. To reduce the risk of being late, we took a cab out to the house, and waited for about 15 min. before James arrived. (On a side note, the cabbie was probably the nicest cabbie I have ever had and wished us luck after offering his recommendations on where to look).
James arrived and took us up to the top floor of the building. The entrance was a long awkward hallway which lead to a fairly spacious living room/open kitchen setup. To the back of the unit were the two bedrooms and the bathroom. The flooring was carpeted, not super nice, but not offensive. No strange odors were present. It seemed like the best place we had seen so far and within our budget. We were very excited and let the agent James know. After talking to him for a short while, we learned that there were others interested but from the way he was talking about it, it seemed that we were towards the top of the list. So we decided to fill out applications and fax them in. And at that point it was pretty much a waiting game.
In the mean time, we called Citiapartments, a rental agency, to see if they had any listings available. Justin made the call so I'm not sure what the guy said, but I'm pretty sure he laughed when he heard our request of a 2 bedroom for under $2400. The cheapest they had was one for ~$2700/mo. We called another agency and there was a listing in Outer Mission within the budget so we decided we'd head out that way after a quick brunch.
The agency was located in Noe Valley, so we took a quick bus there from Sunset after faxing in our applications. After picking up the keys and getting the exact address, I plugged it into my phone only to find it was roughly 5 miles away from where we were--which was already about 3-4 miles away from the office. It was much farther from work than we wanted so instead of looking at it, we just killed time by walking around the neighborhood we were in.
Noe Valley was beautiful. It was quite hilly, and lots of little quaint shops and stores along 24th street, the main commercial strip for the neighborhood. It was also just a few blocks west of the Mission, where we saw the apartment that we liked the previous day. We immediately liked the area and wondered what the rents were here. But as expected, the rents were extremely high--from $2600 and up for a 2-bedroom. Tired and unsure of what to do, we ended up having lunch in the area with MHK.
Over lunch, one of the owners from an open house that we went to on Wednesday called to offer us the apartment. It was the offensively blue unit in the Richmond area. Justin stalled and told Chris, the owner, that we'd get back to him tomorrow morning because we had other apartments to view. I immediately called "James" to make sure he got the fax, and he told me that he did but it wouldn't be processed for a couple days--just like the agent from the Mission. So we ended up with a tough decision: take an apartment that we didn't like to assure that we had a place to live, or hold out to make sure we didn't hate our living situation. But we had until morning to decide.
We didn't have any open houses to go to and no other appointments for the day. Nervous and stressed, we made our way back over to Sunset in search of "For Rent" signs in windows. With not much luck, we found ourselves in an Irish bar, and continuing to search online for leads. After a couple of beers, I noticed that there was an open house scheduled from 6:00pm - 6:30pm that was located roughly 10 blocks west, and 2 blocks south of where we were. The current time: 6:13pm. We closed out our tab and bolted out the door down the street. No cabs were in sight, so we just had to move fast. I decided to call around 6:25pm when we were close, but probably not within 5 minutes walking just yet to make sure they'd still be there. The woman was pleasant enough and agreed to stay until we got there.
Out of breath, we greeted the open house agent and thanked her for staying, and then proceeded to view the flat. This place was HUGE: parquet wood flooring in the living room and bedrooms; tile in the enormous kitchen; and 2 bathrooms. It was actually pretty incredible for the rent. We eagerly filled out applications and spoke further with the agent. She seemed interested in us as well and after telling her we were wanting to sign by Saturday, she told us she'd get back to us no later than Friday afternoon--the next day. If only James could have been so efficient!
We left grinning broadly and simply amazed at the size and quality of the apartment. But then one question rang to mind after we walked about a block and a half away: where's the laundry? Justin called the agent and asked, and she said it was just on the next block. I checked google maps and didn't see anything within a third of a mile. It was about a 5-10 minute walk to Irving St., which was the closest commercial road. Unconvinced of her answer, we decided to scout around the neighborhood a bit in hopes of finding a a hidden laundry facility somewhere. No dice. Again, our hopes turned to dust as we thought about the prospect of having to walk over a quarter mile up and down hill to do laundry for a year.
Broken and defeated, we returned Downtown for dinner to end the day feeling more certain that we would not have a lease signed before our flight out on Saturday.
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