Adventures in Apartment Hunting

If you’re like us and searching for the perfect apartment from almost 400 miles away, you know that it is really annoying.  Like super annoying.  You’re dodging Craigslist scams and pictures taken at such an angle as to miss the fact that the kitchen is too small to open the fridge door and you keep wondering why people think their space is worth $400 more than what you’re paying now for less space and why are you moving again???

We took a last minute trip two weekends ago to check the area out.  Let’s just say it was … enlightening.  As in, we were enlightened to the fact that Justin needs to get a really good offer for us to be able to live here and still eat.  

The one thing that made the whole process suck less was PadMapper.com.  Their tagline is actually “making apartment hunting suck less” and it totally did.  This site let’s you search by area, number of rooms, price, pet policy, etc. and plots on a map all the listings from all the major apartment websites.  All in one place you get listings from Craigslist, rent.com, and others.  It was a life saver for sure.  You can also overlay maps of crime reports or public transportation and, because the map base in Google Maps, you can see restaurants and shopping in the area.  All in one place!  Cue the fireworks!

Source: Screenshot of PadMapper.com

So, other than our excited discovery of PadMapper, I left slightly disheartened to get back to work while Justin stayed behind to have his final interview.  Luckily he had some time on that last day and was able to check a few more places, one of which stood out as a contender.  Finally!  Just because it was slightly above the top range of our budget was no reason to write it off yet!  It had a full-size fridge!  And a balcony big enough for more than one person!  And you could open the fridge door all the way without hitting the counter on the other side of the kitchen!  I was sold without even seeing it.   But of course no decisions could be made right away since we still had to wait for Justin to, you know, actually get the job.  Now that there is an offer and a decision to take it, stay tuned for another apartment hunting post, hopefully with a happier ending.