Riding the Rails

Feeling nostalgic on my last day commuting from Sunnyvale before I move to SF. My daily commute has been extreme: a two-mile bike ride to the Sunnyvale Caltrain station, then a train ride from Sunnyvale to San Francisco that can take anywhere from 45 to 76 minutes (assuming no delays), and then a mile-long walk to work. All told, I have been spending 3.5 to 4 hours per day commuting.

In the past six months, I have traveled 9,801 miles by train, 484 miles by bike, and 242 miles by foot.

But, it hasn't been all bad. I have loved having a bike ride built into my day. The train is perfect for reading, and way more relaxing than driving to SF. I enjoy that I've become a regular at the Bean Scene, my favorite cafe in downtown Sunnyvale.

All the same, I am looking forward to my new roundtrip commute of 0.4 miles!

Apartment FTW!

I finally found an apartment in San Francisco!

For over two months, I have been compulsively checking Craigslist for new apartment postings.  I even had an RSS feed in Google Reader.  As I learned after my first couple of weeks of hunting, you have to respond extremely quickly to get a place.  If you don't show up to the open house with all of your paperwork filled out, you don't stand a chance.

Nine weeks and 30 apartments later, I had truly honed my apartment hunting skills.  Open houses are for fools, having to compete with so many other people.  So, when I saw a posting on Wednesday for an open house at 10 am on Thursday for a cute little studio with bay windows and hardwood floors two blocks from work, I immediately emailed the broker--Pam the Rental Gal--to see if we could schedule something for 9:30.  She was available!  I got her to send me a copy of the application form, and filled it out completely, putting together a packet with a cover letter, the application form, some supplemental applicant information, my resume, and my most recent pay stub.  I didn't include my credit report because they wanted to run the report themselves.

I met Pam Thursday morning, walking those two gloriously short blocks from work at Powell and Market to the apartment on Mason at Eddy.  The building is tall and narrow--eight floors, but only four units per floor.  The neighborhood is full of hotels, hostels, restaurants, shopping, and tourists, because it's so close to the cable cars and Union Square.  I felt perfectly safe walking there, which is more than I can say for some of the apartments I viewed in the Tenderloin, or even lower Nob Hill.

Pam and I took the elevator up to the fifth floor to check out the apartment.  Here are the photos from the Craigslist ad to give you an idea of what I saw.  This is the main space of the studio, with those gorgeous bay windows for which I hadn't been daring to hope:

Here's the other side of the room, looking at the big closet:

You can see the hallway and the front door, and those black stripes are in the tiny, tiny kitchen:

There are about six inches of counter space next to the sink.  I'm going to have to put in some sort of pantry organizer rack so I have somewhere to store food, a microwave and a toaster, I think.  You might be wondering, where's the fridge?  Well, they creatively installed it in the hallway, with the back of the fridge capitalizing on a bit of dead space in the far right corner of the closet:

The bathroom is through that door to the left:

So, after inspecting the apartment, I turned in my application to Pam, who quite literally squealed in delight at how organized I was.  She told me that she was doing the open house at 10, but assuming that my credit and eviction reports looked good, she'd give me a call that afternoon to offer me the place!

It was very difficult to focus on work on Thursday, waiting for Pam to call.  But, call she did, offering me the apartment, and telling me that I was lucky that I turned in my application first, because two other people handed in applications at the open house.  My cunning strategy had paid off!  I signed the lease electronically that afternoon, turned in a cashier's check Friday morning, and by 10:30 am on Friday had the key to my new apartment in hand.

It was a rather whirlwind experience, to search for an apartment for so long, preparing myself to make so many compromises on location and features, only to get an apartment fewer than 48 hours after first seeing the post on Craigslist.  Now, I'm packing, and plan to hire my brother and one of his friends to help me move next weekend.  I'm so glad to get Veterans Day off to start setting things up!  I need a number of things for my apartment, but I'm not going to rush to buy them all at once.  Rather, I'm going to take some time to start living in that space, and think creatively about the best ways to take advantage of my small space.  For instance, my biggest debate right now is whether I want to loft my full-size bed to free up more floor space.

I am so excited for this new chapter in my life.  As much as starting my new job has been a major turning point, I think that finding this apartment signifies officially becoming an independent adult.  It is a wonderful feeling, and I am definitely counting my blessings.