The First Month... Part 1 (Housing Issues)

Hey everyone, sorry I haven't updated in forever... have been very busy and a tad bit lazy with my free time. When you work 40 - 45 hours a week staring at a computer screen, staring at one during your free time is a lot less appealing :)

Let's start from the beginning.

The plan was simple enough... put all my possessions in my car Wednesday (2/11), stay in a hotel halfway there in Deming New Mexico Wednesday night, make the rest of the drive Thursday and stay in a San Antonio hotel Thursday night, and then move into my apartment on the agreed upon day, February 13th. I start work on Monday the 16th.

I get a call on TUESDAY, less then 24 hours before I'm getting ready to leave, from Sunrise Apartments, the place I'm getting my apartment.

"Hi David... we're really sorry but your apartment isn't going to be ready until the 20th."

Apparently, the people who were living in the apartment I was moving into (#7305) were moving into another unit in the same apartment complex. The apartment that they were moving into was currently inhabited by a family that was moving into a house elsewhere. Still with me?

The family that was moving into the house said they needed another week (and waited until the last minute to tell Sunrise Canyon this. That meant that the people currently in my apartment had nowhere to go. And thus I was screwed.

So the solution that was offered to me was that there was another unit available that was just under 200 square feet bigger that I could move into on the day I was planning to be there (the 13th). Due to the inconvenience, instead of getting it at the market price of over 900/mo, they'd knock it down to 840/mo for me. The other place was going to be 795/mo. I wasn't thrilled as I liked the layout to the one I had chosen a lot better, but I was certainly getting decent value here, and the alternative was leaving all of my worldly possessions in my car for a week while I slept in some Motel 6 for a week. With less then a day to mull this over, I agreed to do this.

I didn't realize just how much I hated the layout of this place until I actually got there. I mean I knew, but I was trying to be optimistic. Here is the floorplan; see if you can scope out the issues.



First of all, you walk into the dining room from the front door. I like walking into a living room, not a dining room. I don't want the first thing I see when I walk into my home to be a dining room table.

Secondly, the living room design is terrible. By putting a window and the door to the deck on that wall, you make that wall useless; can't put a TV or a couch against it. As such, you are forced with a loveseat and a couch to have a floating loveseat, since the couch will go against one wall and the TV against the other, the loveseat has to float. Notice how the wall on the right is longer than the wall on the left? For someone OCD like me, do you have any idea how maddening it is to have a floating piece of furniture that isn't parallel or perpendicular to the wall?

And perhaps most disturbingly, doesn't it strike you as slightly odd that the bathroom door opens up right into the dining room? I'm imagining having people over for dinner and I or my guest needs to use the restroom. They get up from the dining room table and the bathroom is two steps away? Really? This just struck me as very odd/annoying.

The final straw came when the DirecTV installation guy arrived. I'm in an area that can't get Time Warner Cable, so my only option to watch out-of-area sports was to go with a dish. Of course I still want to watch Kings hockey (and get the baseball package as well), so I ordered DirecTV. The guy shows up and says my deck is facing the wrong direction and thus I can not get dish TV (meaning no Kings hockey, ever). The kicker? My original apartment was facing the right way.

This news, coupled with the lousy layout of the place that I hated and the fact that I was paying $45 more a month, was too much. I can only be so agreeable and so optimistic. I went to the office and told them I wanted a place with the other layout that was facing the right way for DirecTV ASAP. They did have one available fortunately, and one week after I'd moved into this place, I had to move all my stuff and all my furniture into a different place.

And, of course, I had to change my electricity and other billing address at about 5 different places for the 3rd time; Initially I'd given them all #7305, changed them all to the new address, and now I was changing them to my 3rd and final address.

As if ONE move halfway across the country isn't stressful enough.