For rent

Last week we started apartment hunting in Salt Lake. I liked it about as much as I like Eliza knowing how to climb out of her crib. And, like the crib issue, it’s going to take a while to solve.

Our first problem was that we set our budget too low. I naively thought there would be lots of people anxious to rent us a two-bedroom apartment with a fenced in backyard and patio and personal servants and built in pool for $600 a month. While that may have been true about a century ago, it was clearly not the case now.

Checking craigslist gave us a list of potential places to check out, and maps.google.com really helped out our search (like when we eliminated a “great” place from our list after noticing the close crop job on the picture hid one of the city's busiest streets running just alongside the house). Sometimes the title alone was enough to convince us. Like one that was listed as "Disgusting 2 bdrm apartment for rent." Lucky for us, it went on to spill all the disgusting details about the mold, management and neighborhood. (Why they were listing it at all, I don't know.) But there were some things that even the anti-privacy street view of Google Earth wasn't able to tell us. Let me indulge you in a quick recap. (And thank heavens for a portable DVD player and McDonald’s ice cream cones.)

Visit #1: Mark made an appointment to check out a place after work. He arrived, and found the next door managers were drunk (at 4:45pm). On his way out, he recognized the government-subsidized housing a few houses down, and was more than happy to leave that neighborhood for good when he noticed a man with his hand down his pants. Seeing as our two-year-old already has that trick figured out, I don't think we need any role models along that line. Suddenly $850 didn't seem like too much to pay for a good neighborhood.

Visit #4: We found a quiet little neighborhood close to Mark’s work that looked pretty potential. There was a grassy area between the two apartment buildings, and a garden area. Feeling hopeful, we were shown to the available apartment, just to find it occupied with the manager’s two cats. Sage (and Mark, of course) thought this was awesome. I’m not sure I want to live downstairs from the guy who keeps cats that he doesn’t like enough to want to stay in his own apartment. How long have they been living there? And what if they decide to move in with us? I can’t have a Napkins experience in my fragile pregnant state.

Visit #8: We took a tour of a cute little house that was nicely decorated and refinished. Until I checked out the bathroom, I was willing to put the words “little” and “cute” together in describing this house. What I saw, in the bathroom, was a “little” and “terrible” passageway through which my 6-month-pregnant body would have to shimmy (sideways) to pass the sink and shower in order to reach the toilet. And you know the affinity we pregnant women have for using the bathroom. Well, I just couldn’t get too excited about having to hold my stomach up and slide it along the sink countertop to be able to reach the throne twice a night and sixteen times a day for the next 4 months.

Visit #9: Nice house with attractive backyard. Big open canal of running water next to driveway. Good bye.

Visit #12: Is it unfair to judge a neighborhood by the number of lawns that are mowed? If so, I don’t know that a 50% stat is very encouraging. Mark and I debated whether it was fair to say that people who don’t take care of their lawns probably aren’t going to be very interested in promoting neighborhood beauty, safety, and goodwill. And I can’t imagine anyone bringing us homemade bread or extra home grown foot-long zucchinis to welcome us to that neighborhood. Forget it, then.

Visit #13: We should have known this was going to be a bust, being visit number thirteen and all. The roads got worse and worse as we entered the south side of Salt Lake proper. We bumped our way down a street that looked like an alley into a “secluded, park-like” area (their words, not mine). We weren’t able to make an appointment in advance, so Mark ran in to check out the public entryway of the apartment building. His grimace, upon returning to the car, confirmed my suspicion. “I thought I was in a third-world country.” Well, since we’ve both already lived in third world countries, we decided to leave that cultural experience for someone without kids who doesn’t mind whether or not the walls are painted or the kids are clothed or not when they run down the public hallway.

Following this delightful Saturday hunt, we decided that Mark commuting an hour each way to work may not be so terrible an option after all. But when we stopped to fill up our car with $45 of gas on the way home, we agreed to take a few more peeks at craigslist. In a week or so when we get the energy.