Place

[prog]

N, M and I officially began our apartment hunt today, looking at two places at Davis. Contrary to expectations, the first, in the middle 200s of Highland Ave, looks like a winner. No dishwasher, and a kitchen straight out of Interior Desecrators (avocado & mango floor, orange flower petals around light fixtures, etc), but very roomy, two off-street parking spaces, and monthly rent right smack on our target budget.

It's a 3BR with a living room, meaning that, since M&N plan to share a bedroom, we'd have a two-room common area (half of which would be The Hack Room) while remaining flexible enough to add a fourth person later, if we wanted. Or so I think. cthulhia once mumbled at me about municipal laws regulating how many people can live in what sorts of places, and I'm hazy on all this...

Anyway, one of N's friends has been on-and-off about joining this project. At last count he was officially Out, but N said today that he asked if we could stay flexible. M, rightly, said "Grr." But we agree that flexibility is good, not just for this other guy's sake. (FWIW I know that he is pondering fleeing to this area to escape a crappy tech job he holds in Central Maine. So, at the very least, I have to appreciate his situation.)

Clearly, I'm leaning towards grabbing this place while we can, and my friends may feel the same. N&M are looking into DSL feasibility for this address now. Yes, I've warned them of the spotty experiences I had with DSL at my last place, up at the east end of Highland, and of the similar cruddly service the much closer Chez Coyote "enjoyed" from the same ISP. N&M have used this ISP, Speakeasy, for 18 months in their Boston apartment, though, and have no complaints. And they really like static IPs at home, for which I cannot fault them. But, they concede that, as we all host our respective vanity domains off-site, it wouldn't be tragic to fall back to RCN or whatever if we had to.

I can pacify any other phsyical network worries with a simple incantation: I own a wireless router.

Hum-de-hum. I welcome insight from locals, if y'all have any. Dire warnings of unspeakable evils nearby (besides cthulhia) that I might have overlooked are most welcome.

I don't want to crow about it too much because I recall all the happy posts I made about apartments I looked at last October, and how I got shut out of all of them. (A big thanks once again to cthulhia for hooking me up with this current dwelling; temporary as it is, it was a lifesaver.) But no manner how it goes, I'm officially excited about moving again, even though I haven't even been at Chez Chestnut 5 months. (Also, I just counted: this will be my 23rd move.) So, in a way, I'm a little cynical about that, plus the fact that I'm willingly moving to a more expensive place. But: the situation is very different. I have far more control over the situation, the area is familiar and close to many friends (of all three of us!) and cool places, and most especially, I'll be living with people on the same wavelength as me. These things shall remain true for whatever place we eventually land in. But, I think I'm hoping it'll be this one place!

(The other place we looked at was on Morrison, and also had pretty good location, but was more expensive, cramped, and had people living in it. Who were standing around. It took me back to my own first apartment in Bangor, where my landlord just loved showing my apartment to people (and once leaving me a note that it was too messy). I was happy that it was a clearly inferior place, because I was very uncomfortable intruding on those tenants.)

Comments

housing

[cthulhia]

cthulhia once mumbled at me about municipal laws regulating how many people can live in what sorts of places, and I'm hazy on all this...

in *arlington*, I was led to believe there was a restriction on more than 3 unrelated adults in a house. I have heard no such thing about Somerville.