earlgreytea68 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
earlgreytea68) wrote2011-07-08 07:51 pm
earlgreytea68) wrote2011-07-08 07:51 pm
Entry tags:
A New Englander Moves to New Orleans, Chapter One: Finding the Apartment
As anyone with a passing acquaintance with my LJ may have discerned, I adore Boston. It wasn't always this way. I mean, I always loved Boston, but it wasn't until I moved away that I realized how much it truly fits me. In my isolated little world, I had assumed that Boston was pretty much like every place else, and that every place else would be a bit like Boston. I knew there would be differences, but I was unprepared for the size of those differences, for the chasm between a place like Boston and a place like New Orleans. This is not to say that one is better than the other, merely to say that they appeal to different people. I think Boston is the best place in the universe, but I readily acknowledge that it is the best place in the universe only for a very particular type of person, which I happen to be. And I didn't know any of that until the first time I moved to New Orleans.
So now I find, strangely, that I am moving back to New Orleans. This is the way life works, in these odd, random spurts. The first time I lived in New Orleans, I admit I didn't do too well. There is A LOT of culture shock between New Orleans and Boston. I am trying to do better this time around. I am trying to appreciate New Orleans for what it is. And, I figure, people can learn from the mistakes I make in trying to adjust to a totally different lifestyle.
The first step of any move is to find an apartment. I just looked for an apartment in Boston last year, so I know from experience that, in Boston, you can get three or four new pages of Craigslist postings every twenty minutes. Looking for an apartment was an endless feast to wade through. Granted, most of them I dismissed, but still, choices for renting in Boston are wide and disparate.
In New Orleans, I was lucky if Craigslist saw three or four new postings a week. It was frustrating and began to be nervewracking as the house-hunting weekend approached. I am extraordinarily picky, and I was worried that I wouldn't find anything that was acceptable to me.
So I was already nervous about the search, which was not helped when the flights down to New Orleans were utter chaos. My parents were flying out of Providence, I was flying out of Boston, and we were meeting in Newark for the flight down to New Orleans. First, the people in Boston gave me my mother's boarding pass instead of my own (crack security!) and then my parents' flight out of Providence was canceled altogether, so that they weren't flying in until Saturday morning. This was when it all came crashing back to me, how utterly terrible it is to get to New Orleans from New England. It's so much easier to get to Europe. I think there is one direct flight between Boston and New Orleans. I plan to pay whatever price that airline is demanding, because I cannot go through this terrible pattern of delays and cancellations every time I fly home. So I was feeling very lonely and depressed and I got off the plane at something like 1 a.m. (hours later than I was supposed to get in), which was really 2 a.m. my time, and I got the car and I got lost getting on the highway (you know, I have to say, people always complain about signage in Boston, but signage is pretty terrible in most places. Las Vegas has good signage. And New York City is pretty good, but mostly because their streets go in order). I got to the hotel finally nearing 3 a.m. my time and every single credit card I had--AND my debit card--all got declined. I was like, "????" Because I had plenty of available credit AND enough money in my account. The hotel let me check in anyway, and, at 3 a.m., I was sitting on my hotel room bed calling my bank and my credit card companies, all of which said that there were no issues and the transaction went through. Three times. Sigh. I decided against dealing with it then and went to bed.
I only slept a few hours before waking up and going downstairs. I went to the front desk to figure out what was going on. They were bewildered and said the transactions went through and they don't know why I was told the cards were declined. Apparently that was just a fun little prank. So we straightened out the charges and then I treated myself to a nice breakfast in the elegant dining room of the hotel before going to pick my parents up at the airport, and from there we went straight to the realtor's office.
I'd had a list of the places I wanted to see. They were all already rented. Apparently, according to my realtor, New Orleans is, like, the only place in the country not going through a housing recession. She said apartments are being rented immediately, that you have to pounce right on them as soon as they become available. This didn't seem to bode well to me. The places she took me to were all ENORMOUS but hadn't been renovated since the 1960s. This is one thing if you are buying a house and can make it your own, another thing entirely when it's an apartment you're only living in for a couple of years. I was like, "I don't need all this space. I need something much smaller, with nicer finishes." She said I needed to spend more money. So I threw my budget out the window. Whatever, I will skimp and save and eat out a lot less, but it's worth it for me to have an oven that's not rusted through. Even with the budget increase, I still only found one place that really fit all my needs, and even that I wasn't overly crazy about, but whatever, it was the best I was going to find, so I said I would take it. This necessitated driving to Rite-Aid and buying four money orders with my debit card because they wouldn't accept personal check.
Relieved that we'd found a place, we spent the rest of our time in New Orleans pretty much lounging by the pool before going home.
On Monday, my realtor called to say my offer had been accepted and they would send me the lease. Days went by. On Thursday, I e-mailed my realtor to be like, "??? Is there a problem? Where's the lease?" "No problem," she assured me. "You'll get the lease any day now."
They FINALLY sent the lease on the night of July 4. This was annoying, because I was done with work, meaning that it was no longer as easy for me as it once had been to print and scan and fax things. I printed out the lease and became immediately suspicious upon glancing over the first paragraph. My rent had been quoted to me as one price, but the rent in the lease was $100 higher, saying that I would get a $100 "discount" if I paid by the first of the month. Now, I've never not paid my rent on time, so this should never be an issue, but still, I felt deceived, like they were trying to defraud me in some way. Suspicious, I sat and read the entire lease. It had a bunch of provisions about how I would have to pay for trash collection and stuff. I was like, "???" So I e-mailed my realtor, to be like, "Look at all these sketchy things." She told me it was totally common in New Orleans to pull this trick with the rent. I continue to think that's sketchy beyond belief. She also said that the only utility I have to pay for is electricity, that the lease was a standard lease that hadn't been adjusted to the circumstances of my condo community. I was like, "It took this idiot a week to fill my name into a blank on a form lease?" Well, I said it nicer than that. I also pointed out that the lease said I can't put anything on the wall, using any method. I've seen the no-nails clause in a lease before and always ignored it, but this lease specifically said I couldn't use the sticker-mount things that I thought were specifically supposed to be for people who were renting. My realtor said this was also fairly common to have in a lease and that those sticker-mount things harm the walls. Well. Who knew? Especially since they're specifically advertised as not harming walls.
I decided to let them get away with all their sketchiness, chiefly because I did not think I'd be able to find another acceptable apartment, and e-mailed back on Tuesday--the day after I received the lease--to ask if I could start the lease a couple of days early, because they'd told me the apartment was available earlier. I said that I would be happy to pay a pro-rated part of the rent in exchange. This should have been a no-brainer: The apartment's sitting empty, let me move in and you can make some extra money. These people were too idiotic to even ANSWER me. Finally, yesterday, I gave up that they would ever respond to me and said, "Whatever, forget about starting the lease early, I'll just send it back to you as is." And they wrote back, "Thanks. We need it as soon as possible, we're waiting on it to finalize another transaction." Oh, yeah. You take one full week to send me a form lease and then three days to NOT answer the single question I had, and then you're going to try to pretend that I'm the one dragging my feet? Maniac people. I refused to send them the lease yesterday, as a matter of principle, and sent it off to them today. (This necessitated me driving through rainstorms so severe that the post office was closed when I got there due to flooding.)
Next time: THE DRAMA OF PACKING AND MOVING 1,500 MILES
So now I find, strangely, that I am moving back to New Orleans. This is the way life works, in these odd, random spurts. The first time I lived in New Orleans, I admit I didn't do too well. There is A LOT of culture shock between New Orleans and Boston. I am trying to do better this time around. I am trying to appreciate New Orleans for what it is. And, I figure, people can learn from the mistakes I make in trying to adjust to a totally different lifestyle.
The first step of any move is to find an apartment. I just looked for an apartment in Boston last year, so I know from experience that, in Boston, you can get three or four new pages of Craigslist postings every twenty minutes. Looking for an apartment was an endless feast to wade through. Granted, most of them I dismissed, but still, choices for renting in Boston are wide and disparate.
In New Orleans, I was lucky if Craigslist saw three or four new postings a week. It was frustrating and began to be nervewracking as the house-hunting weekend approached. I am extraordinarily picky, and I was worried that I wouldn't find anything that was acceptable to me.
So I was already nervous about the search, which was not helped when the flights down to New Orleans were utter chaos. My parents were flying out of Providence, I was flying out of Boston, and we were meeting in Newark for the flight down to New Orleans. First, the people in Boston gave me my mother's boarding pass instead of my own (crack security!) and then my parents' flight out of Providence was canceled altogether, so that they weren't flying in until Saturday morning. This was when it all came crashing back to me, how utterly terrible it is to get to New Orleans from New England. It's so much easier to get to Europe. I think there is one direct flight between Boston and New Orleans. I plan to pay whatever price that airline is demanding, because I cannot go through this terrible pattern of delays and cancellations every time I fly home. So I was feeling very lonely and depressed and I got off the plane at something like 1 a.m. (hours later than I was supposed to get in), which was really 2 a.m. my time, and I got the car and I got lost getting on the highway (you know, I have to say, people always complain about signage in Boston, but signage is pretty terrible in most places. Las Vegas has good signage. And New York City is pretty good, but mostly because their streets go in order). I got to the hotel finally nearing 3 a.m. my time and every single credit card I had--AND my debit card--all got declined. I was like, "????" Because I had plenty of available credit AND enough money in my account. The hotel let me check in anyway, and, at 3 a.m., I was sitting on my hotel room bed calling my bank and my credit card companies, all of which said that there were no issues and the transaction went through. Three times. Sigh. I decided against dealing with it then and went to bed.
I only slept a few hours before waking up and going downstairs. I went to the front desk to figure out what was going on. They were bewildered and said the transactions went through and they don't know why I was told the cards were declined. Apparently that was just a fun little prank. So we straightened out the charges and then I treated myself to a nice breakfast in the elegant dining room of the hotel before going to pick my parents up at the airport, and from there we went straight to the realtor's office.
I'd had a list of the places I wanted to see. They were all already rented. Apparently, according to my realtor, New Orleans is, like, the only place in the country not going through a housing recession. She said apartments are being rented immediately, that you have to pounce right on them as soon as they become available. This didn't seem to bode well to me. The places she took me to were all ENORMOUS but hadn't been renovated since the 1960s. This is one thing if you are buying a house and can make it your own, another thing entirely when it's an apartment you're only living in for a couple of years. I was like, "I don't need all this space. I need something much smaller, with nicer finishes." She said I needed to spend more money. So I threw my budget out the window. Whatever, I will skimp and save and eat out a lot less, but it's worth it for me to have an oven that's not rusted through. Even with the budget increase, I still only found one place that really fit all my needs, and even that I wasn't overly crazy about, but whatever, it was the best I was going to find, so I said I would take it. This necessitated driving to Rite-Aid and buying four money orders with my debit card because they wouldn't accept personal check.
Relieved that we'd found a place, we spent the rest of our time in New Orleans pretty much lounging by the pool before going home.
On Monday, my realtor called to say my offer had been accepted and they would send me the lease. Days went by. On Thursday, I e-mailed my realtor to be like, "??? Is there a problem? Where's the lease?" "No problem," she assured me. "You'll get the lease any day now."
They FINALLY sent the lease on the night of July 4. This was annoying, because I was done with work, meaning that it was no longer as easy for me as it once had been to print and scan and fax things. I printed out the lease and became immediately suspicious upon glancing over the first paragraph. My rent had been quoted to me as one price, but the rent in the lease was $100 higher, saying that I would get a $100 "discount" if I paid by the first of the month. Now, I've never not paid my rent on time, so this should never be an issue, but still, I felt deceived, like they were trying to defraud me in some way. Suspicious, I sat and read the entire lease. It had a bunch of provisions about how I would have to pay for trash collection and stuff. I was like, "???" So I e-mailed my realtor, to be like, "Look at all these sketchy things." She told me it was totally common in New Orleans to pull this trick with the rent. I continue to think that's sketchy beyond belief. She also said that the only utility I have to pay for is electricity, that the lease was a standard lease that hadn't been adjusted to the circumstances of my condo community. I was like, "It took this idiot a week to fill my name into a blank on a form lease?" Well, I said it nicer than that. I also pointed out that the lease said I can't put anything on the wall, using any method. I've seen the no-nails clause in a lease before and always ignored it, but this lease specifically said I couldn't use the sticker-mount things that I thought were specifically supposed to be for people who were renting. My realtor said this was also fairly common to have in a lease and that those sticker-mount things harm the walls. Well. Who knew? Especially since they're specifically advertised as not harming walls.
I decided to let them get away with all their sketchiness, chiefly because I did not think I'd be able to find another acceptable apartment, and e-mailed back on Tuesday--the day after I received the lease--to ask if I could start the lease a couple of days early, because they'd told me the apartment was available earlier. I said that I would be happy to pay a pro-rated part of the rent in exchange. This should have been a no-brainer: The apartment's sitting empty, let me move in and you can make some extra money. These people were too idiotic to even ANSWER me. Finally, yesterday, I gave up that they would ever respond to me and said, "Whatever, forget about starting the lease early, I'll just send it back to you as is." And they wrote back, "Thanks. We need it as soon as possible, we're waiting on it to finalize another transaction." Oh, yeah. You take one full week to send me a form lease and then three days to NOT answer the single question I had, and then you're going to try to pretend that I'm the one dragging my feet? Maniac people. I refused to send them the lease yesterday, as a matter of principle, and sent it off to them today. (This necessitated me driving through rainstorms so severe that the post office was closed when I got there due to flooding.)
Next time: THE DRAMA OF PACKING AND MOVING 1,500 MILES