My parents forewarned me that there would come a time in the relationship when it would just be easier to get married than live separately. Sure enough, that day came and Mr. Wonderful and I both asked each other, “Why don’t we just get married and move to Seattle?” We had known for a while that we wanted to get married. It was like we were waiting for the cosmos to align just right, and then we realized that we could cast our own stars. So we got engaged. And then we started looking for a place in Seattle.
I won’t be moving in until after the wedding in December, and Matt’s current lease isn’t up until January, but we decided to start looking sooner for various reasons. One of them being the weather. Moving is hassle enough without having to dodge raindrops and dash in and out of buildings while carrying heavy boxes and furniture. Another reason is that Matt is done with the commute. DONE. Perhaps the bus commute wouldn’t be so bad if his hours were a bit shorter and more predictable, but he never knows when he will get off of work, and lately he has been staying late. The last thing he needs at the end of a long day is to wait in the dark at a bus stop to ride a stinky, crowded bus for an hour or more.
The best solution for us is to move straight into the heart of the city, where Matt can be close enough to work to have some commuting options. Also, working closer to home alleviates the worry that late work nights will leave him stranded in Seattle overnight. He likes his job, but he would rather not have to convert his desk into a sleeping alcove and use his shoe as a pillow.
Though we want to be relatively close to Matt’s work, we also want to be in a good neighborhood, so we concentrated on Upper Queen Anne and Ballard. We’ve been scouring Craigslist for rentals available in these locations. A couple weeks ago, I found a posting for a one-bedroom upstairs unit of a house in Queen Anne. The pictures were small, but the place looked cute, like it might have some character. Matt sent an e-mail to the landlord and set up an appointment to view the apartment.
You know those dogs that look the same coming and going? This house was like that. It had an entry that looked more like a back door. I knew immediately that Matt was not impressed and was already starting to back away, but I was determined to give the house a fair shot, seeing as we put in all the effort to drive up there and find the place.
Matt called up the landlord, whose name we cannot pronounce, and let him know we were there. He came jogging around the side of the home with wet splotches on his pants, which I hoped were from some home improvement project it appeared he had been working on at the other side of the house. Matt and I both got a creepy vibe from the guy right away.
He didn’t help our opinion of him by proceeding to lead us up the stairs and knock on the current resident’s door, who was in the process of cleaning the apartment and moving out. We had the appointment for half a week, and he was just notifying the tenant as we stood at the door? How courteous.
As we entered the apar–er, disaster area, the current tenant expressed that the place is “really is nice when it’s all clean!” Matt and I were greeted with two cats trying to escape the apartment as we entered (a sign?) and scattered wood shavings on the floor that had somehow escaped from the nearby guinea pig cage. (Really, how do shavings from one guinea pig get ALL OVER THE FLOOR? And why do you have cats AND a rodent? Wait, perhaps this explains the shavings…) The tenant’s sister had come to help her move, and I stepped over her broom on my way to the kitchen.
The kitchen was walled off and impossibly narrow. I walked to the end of the kitchen, opened the dingy, filmy cupboards, to find a hodge podge collection of food that clearly indicated no cooking was ever done in this kitchen. I turned around and faced Matt, and we both raised our eyebrows so high they hit the ceiling. Which wasn’t difficult, seeing as the roof was slanted in the kitchen, making it seem even more like Willy Wanka’s shrinking room…minus the delicious sweets at the end. (But there was a half-empty bag of stale marshmallows, if you were tempted.)
At this point, we had seen all we needed to see, but out of courtesy, we couldn’t flee the building and run down the street. We continued to the bathroom.
If there was a contest for the pinkest, smallest bathroom in the world, this bathroom would be an award-winner. Pink tile on the floor and walls. Pink sink. Pink toilet. Pink shower. Oh, and maximum occupancy of 1. Cruise ships have bigger bathrooms than this. The Comet sprinkled on everything was a nice touch, though.
When we emerged from the bathroom, the landlord waved to the “bedroom,” which we didn’t even bother taking a look at because, honestly, it was a CLOSET. Matt and I were offended that he even had the nerve to call it a bedroom to our faces. Heck, call it a “sleeping nook” if you want to, but you think you’re going to delude us into thinking that that cranny barely wide enough to fit a mattress is an actual room? No, sir.
We politely followed whats-his-name around as he showed us the rest of the house, and it didn’t get any better. Everything was sketchy. When the landlord asked us to honestly tell him what we thought, the look on Matt’s face was priceless. I knew he was thinking, “Dude, this place is a [dump],” and tried not to laugh (too much) as he tried to come up with a polite answer. I jumped in and said I didn’t think that the amount of stairs the place had would be good for my dogs (honest answer), and withheld the rest.
We left the place in a minor state of shock. We’ve GOT to find something better than that.
We took a stroll up and down Queen Anne Ave calling every apartment we came across, but no luck. Plenty of one-bedroom units available, but none of them took dogs. Is it possible to find a decent (real) one-bedroom dog-friendly apartment in Seattle? We will find out…