It’s official — Prairie and I have a new apartment! We’d been keeping an eye on Craigslist over the past few months as I got closer to graduation, looking for places in the Kent/Des Moines area that fit what we were looking for: two or three bedrooms, two bathrooms, reserved parking, washer and dryer, and if at all possible, a pool (we’ve gotten quite spoiled by having a pool available here during the summer months). By Friday, we had a list of four places we wanted to check out, and we headed off to see how they compared to their on-paper representations.
(I was quite proud of myself for getting us all organized: on Thursday, I’d called the places, set up appointments at each, printed out their Craigslist listings, Google Maps directions from each to the next in order, and a little sheet of questions we wanted to be sure to ask, and stapled them all together into individual packets. As anyone who knows me can attest, this is not normal behavior for me!)
The first apartment was nice, but not quite as close as we wanted; the second apartment had gorgeous grounds, but the 2-bedrooms were too small, the 3-bedrooms too expensive, and it was right off a street that was pretty seedy (think Aurora in Seattle, or Mt. View in Anchorage) and didn’t feel safe; the fourth had a gorgeous view of the Kent valley and was a huge 2-bedroom layout that would have been our pick if we hadn’t already been through the third.
The third place ended up hitting all our “gotta have it” qualifications (3 bed, 2 bath, nice layout, washer/dryer in unit, assigned parking space), our “would be nice if” qualifications (third floor corner apartment available, fireplace, deck, good storage, swimming pool in the complex, right on the bus lines), plus a bunch of other goodies that sold us (nice location next to a golf course and park with lots of bike paths to go walking/skating/riding on, right next to the Green River, about five minute drive from Prairie’s workplace and my future school, exercise room, indoor racquetball court, and a decent neighborhood). Plus, they had fresh-baked cookies still warm from the oven for us! It’s pretty hard to say no to fresh-baked cookies. Ingenious!
After looking at all four choices, we had lunch, then went back to our favorite and put in our application. They called back yesterday to confirm that we were approved, so Prairie will be running over there during her lunch break today to drop off the security deposit and get the final details (official address so I can initiate the moving process with Speakeasy, the actual move-in date, and so on).
One interesting side effect is that this means that after seven years, I’ll be moving out of Seattle. Admittedly, not very far out of Seattle — the Kent-to-Downtown-Seattle drive is only a few minutes longer than the Northgate-to-Downtown-Seattle drive — but still, I’ll no longer have a Seattle address. Something of a milestone there.
More details of the move and all will be posted as things progress, but we should be all moved over in roughly three weeks or so.