From the West Houses: The Hunt

Dear friends and family,

A long-overdue update! The last week has been a busy one, and largely dominated by our search for an unfurnished apartment to move to once our month of furnished luxury ends but we also did something fun. Every Monday evening, there is an outdoor screening of a film on 'the Mall' - a large open park area that extends between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial (perhaps you will recognize it from images of Obama's inauguration). It is lined by museums belonging to the Smithsonian Institute, including the National Air and Space Museum and the National Art Gallery. The event is called 'Screen on the Green', and people bring picnic blankets and park off on the grass to watch the film. It was a very hot evening: hot and humid. The closest I could find to a picnic blanket at Target was a yoga mat, so we perched on this rather narrow strip and had our picnic. The atmosphere was wonderful. We saw a beautiful glowing sunset behind the Washington Monument, and at one point there was a brief rainshower (we sheltered under my umbrella). The film was so-so: "The Goodbye Girl", written by Neil Simon. At one point they must have loaded the wrong reel, because suddely an earlier scene was repeated. We never got to see the end, as we left soon afterwards, but it was fun nonetheless!

[What follows is a fairly detailed account of our house search. The short version is: we've found a cool place to live :-)]

The search started slowly with my foray into Craigslist that led to that one viewing in Takoma Park, then culminated in me frantically working through lists of apartment blocks. But we'll get to that!

On the way home from church the Sunday before last, we happened to notice one of the many containers with newspapers and advertising periodicals that seem to feature on every street corner here contained some copies of a monthly publication called 'Apartment Showcase'. It's about 5 cm thick and turned out to be one of the most comprehensive overviews of what's available for rent in DC. There were at least 15 blocks listed with one-bedroomed apartments in our price class (we gave up on the two-bedroomed thing long ago). I diligently drew up a list of them, with addresses and contact numbers.

(This is what they looked like in winter with snow on them! - Taken in December)

Then started the vetting process.

Were they close to a metro station? What facilities did they have? (Dishwasher, gym, laundry...) And if they met the criteria for location and facilities, did they have a one-bedroomed apartment in our price range available? Many didn't, and somewhere along the line, I discovered the website http://www.apartmentratings.com/, where tenants past and present rate various different apartment blocks. After that, I started looking up the blocks not only on the map, but also on there, which narrowed down the possibilities quite dramatically. The thing with D.C. (or 'The District', as the locals call it), is that many of the cheaper apartment blocks are old and in need of some renewal. D.C. is also a city where many people live in a relatively small area in a temperate climate, so you're going to get some vermin. The problem was that many of the promising apartment blocks turned out to be overrun with cockroaches and/or mice, and some tenants mentioned problems with bedbugs (!). The problem was not necessarily the presence of these pests, as the lackadaisical attitude that the building management had when it came to dealing with them. If a building had review after review that said the place was overrun with cockroaches and that management didn't seem too concerned to do anything about it, it got struck off my list. Likewise places with lots of students. (Although I'm not comparing students to cockroaches, of course!)

After this intensive sifting process, I managed to make two appointments for viewings: one on Wednesday evening, and one on Friday morning. The Wednesday evening apartment had a lot going for it: it was 'downtown', i.e. in the centre of the city, two minutes from a metro station, 10 minutes from Chinatown (where there are a lot of restaurants and things), it was newly renovated (albeit with cream wall-to-wall carpeting - not very practical!), it was in a small block (3 storeys), it had a balcony and a dishwasher, and the laundry was just across the hallway. And there is a fantastic supermarket 5 minutes' walk down the road, they had a deal with the local gym that tenants could join for $25 a month, it had a free parking space (a rarity in DC!) and the rent was cheap: $1414 a month + electricity. The area seemed slightly shady, but when we went back at 10 o'clock at night, it looked quite okay.

In the meantime, a rental agency who I had emailed at the weekend finally got back to me. Enter Capri, the bubbly agent form Urban Igloo! They are the only agency in DC that deals solely with rentals (as opposed to both property sales and rentals), and their service to renters is free of charge. They didn't have much to show me, as this is the busiest time of the year (many people seem to plan moves for the summer), but they did have one up in Adams Morgan... This turned out to be the one I had an appointment to view on the Friday morning. Capri picked me up (this is the other perk: they drive you around!) in her old black Merc on Thursday evening to go and have a look at some apartments, and we saw a larger, more expensive one in the same block, and I was rather underwhelmed. I still preferred the other. On the Friday, however. Capri took me up there again, and I saw the actual apartment (they had been fixing it up until then), and that was enough to make me very confused. This was on a lower floor (the 3rd), overlooking a garden, so you don't feel as if you're in a big block at all. And although it didn't have a dishwasher, it had a bigger kitchen than the one I had seen previously. And loads of space. Other perks: a roof deck with views of all the major landmarks in the city, a gym in the basement and a very good supermarket next door, plus the fact that it's in a lovely area (embassies of Poland and Lithuania just a few doors down, park across the road) and that John F. Kennedy lived there as a young, up-and-coming politician.

We saw the apartment together on Saturday, and we were sold. This one doesn't have the parking space, it's further from a metro station (10-15 mins' walk), the laundry is in the basement and the rent is more expensive, but we decided the other one is a bit TOO much in the middle of everything, and that we preferred something a bit quieter. Our book for newcomers to DC describes the apartment blocks in Adams Morgan (that area of DC) as being like an old cadillac with the seats patched with duct tape: they may have seen better days, but the definitely have character! This is certainly the case with this apartment: the fixtures are (to put it kindly) retro, but they are well-maintained. And the parquet floors are gorgeous.

Today I handed in all the paperwork and paid the 'management fee'. We will be signing the lease contract sometime next week and moving on Sunday the 8th. Here are a few photos: