new home v2.0

i have incredibly great news this evening (for me at least, maybe not so much for you. you could probably care less) … after less than 12 hours of apartment searching i found a place that i’m very happy with. i must say that it was completely unuexpected. i woke up this morning and went to look at two places in ravenswood. while they were decent they were quite small and a bit out of the way. living off the brown line wouldn’t have been the worst thing but i wasn’t really interested in doing it. after that i ended up going to look at three other units in edgewater. they were nice and i decided one of them was a good option as being a finalist.

now i was with my friend kevin walking in lakeview when a lady for one of my apartments called and tried moving my appointment back almost two hours. i was having none of that so i just cancelled on her. my friend ended up convincing me to go to one of those apartment finding services. having a bad experience or two in texas, i was trying to avoid this. i did it anyway since i had some time to kill.

an hour later i was out looking at places. the first sign of success was that for what i was looking at paying for a studio, she was able to find several one bedrooms in some even better areas.

the first place i looked at was in andersonville. it was a 1 bedroom garden unit of a house that was converted into a 2 flat. really great condition as the owner is in the process of redoing it completely. new everything inside and it’s rather spacious, at least more spacious than i had planned. free laundry and i even have a little mudroom/sunroom type area in the entry way. really liked the place.

the second place was a fairly nice 1 bedroom in a lowrise building. the hardwood floors of this place are what got me. i’m a sucker for nice hardwood floors. it was a bit smaller but the living area was sunken from the entry way so it had a neat look.

the third place was a fairly nice 1 bedroom in a lowrise building as well. it was on the 7th floor of about 8 floors. the east view was amazing … it looked out onto the lake which was rather pleasant (it wasn’t an amazing lake view since all it was was lake. had it been lake and some of downtown then i’d be really enthused). yeah it was nice.

ultimately i went with the first place just because it seemed like the perfect place. it’s a house turned two flat so i only have two neighbors so i imagine it will be fairly quiet. my potential landlord lives next door so i wouldn’t have to worry about not getting a hold of management or anything like that. he is finishing up redoing everything inside of it so there likely won’t need a lot of things later on. so i turned in my application and i’m just waiting on the final word which should hopefully be sometime early this week.

this place is really close to come of my favorite places in andersonville: joie de vine (best wine bar ever) will now be a block and a half away, one of my favorite pubs/restaurants is two blocks away, hamburger mary’s/mary’s attic is only a few blocks away. plus there are tons of other great places within a train stop or two: crew, m. henry, and all these othere countless places i’ve heard good things about.

overall i’m pretty exciting. it should be a good place to live in. now i just wait to hear.

so happy that this went so quickly. i couldn’t have asked for it to have been any easier (assuming the rest goes smoothly).

more to come soon.
until later.
.ryan