craigslist

So, the big news that sets up the post for today is that I have a job in Des Moines.  It will cut a few *hundred* miles out of the daily drive Heather and I were doing. The only catch is we have to find a place to move into before our drive actually improves.

To that end I spent yesterday looking into options in Des Moines. There are a lot of potential places we could live. After having my “we don’t have that much stuff” illusions shattered during the move to Atlantic, we definitely want to  find options that have plenty of room.

People often assume we will be buying a house and, while that option would certainly provide a lot of room, we aren’t going to do that right now. We hope to move into a house at some point, but right now we don’t even know how long we will be in Des Moines.  I realized that I am on track to move once a year, every year, from the day I left college.  That is kind of a sad fact.

Given the fact we don’t think buying house is an option right now, but apartments seem kind of small, we started looking into other rental options. There aren’t a lot of rental houses in the area we wanted to live (West Des Moines). There were a few duplexes that looked interesting. I should mention that Craigslist seems to be a pretty solid resource for finding houses and duplexes that aren’t listed in the apartment finder books.

What we found was that staying inside our price/location goals didn’t leave that many options beyond apartments even then. I took some time to visit the few we thought might work. I hate to be so down on the people doing the actual showing, but when your basically going to be doing business with an individual instead of a housing company… That first impression matters a lot to me. I went away from everything I looked at thinking “this place isn’t quite what we are looking for, and I don’t know about that guy as a landlord”

As our last option, the plan is to get an apartment and save like crazy towards a house down the road. I looked at a few apartments, and they were, well apartments. As a tangent to that, my last visit of the day (after five so Heather could come too) was to look at a condo an owner wanted to rent out.

The place was amazing! Really nicely done, two bedroom two bathroom unit. It basically had everything we were looking for, and the price was way cheaper than we expected to be paying for anything that big. We did not however decide to go with this option. Maybe you are wondering why. I am going to explain this in the form of a bulleted list addressed to the seller, who no doubt has the same question.

Why Heather and Jordan chose not to rent your condo:

• Craigslist posting lacked essential things such as the location of the listing, and properly spelled words
• Seller sounded disoriented on phone, gave rambling answers that lacked any content.
• Touring a unit where the power has been turned off, while at dusk does not improve the presentation.
• Seller said “I don’t want to live here!”, then declined to answer the follow up “why?”
• Seller gave the impression he was going to be forced to move soon.

I don’t quite know how to put into words the general strangeness of the whole thing, but suffice to say we are still looking.

-Jordan