After a late night, we woke leisurely on Saturday in preparation for a weekend of packing and moving. Around noon we drove down to U-Haul, first stopping at a diner for breakfast, then picking up a van. We got the in-town moving rate ($19.95/day + 59¢/mi) which may not have been that smart given the 55mi distance between Santa Rosa and San Francisco.
The cargo van was nice, much easier to drive and with much better visibility than the 10ft truck I’d rented last year. That and it was brand new. Only 250 miles on the odometer.
Drove it back to the apartment and started packing. I’d already brought down my books and pottery during the week, so I worked on the living room, dusting shelves and preparing furniture. Stephanie packed the kitchen in paper grocery bags using some neat perforated cushion foam from U-Haul. Along the way she kept discovering things she didn’t know I had. Like a salad spinner. And a roasting pan (with rack). And a glass measuring cup with a fat-separating spout (which incredibly has managed to survive several moves).
We packed the van with my couch and matching armchair, a leather desk chair, CDs/DVDs, everything in the kitchen except food, 5 foldable bookshelves, coffee table and end table, two occasional tables, a stool, a kitchen utility table, and two lamps.
Stephanie drove the way down. We parked in the leftmost of three lanes on Pine Street, put the blinkers on, and started bringing things up. For Stephanie, this was the first time she’d seen the apartment since our appointment to view it 3 weeks ago.
She happened to have the brilliant idea of bringing some fingerless workout gloves to ease the strain on our hands. I admit I was unconvinced at first (I’m a boy!), but after using them with the couch and other large items, I’m a convert. They definitely reduced the wear and strain on our hands and wrists. Plus they made us look tough.
It took about an hour and a half to unload. Nothing got set up in the new place, we just set all the furniture by the bay window and all the bags of kitchen supplies in rows along a kitchen wall.
We stopped at the grocery store around the corner to refuel (and explore) before beginning the hour drive back to Santa Rosa. Even though we were tired, exertion of this sort deserves to be celebrated, so after a quick change of clothes we walked over to Russian River for some beer bites (think pizza cheese sticks), chicken wings, and beer.
The plan Sunday morning was to unload Stephanie’s storage unit and bring her things over to my apartment to consolidate for packing and moving next week. She also wanted to photograph some things (futon, kitchen table) for selling on Craigslist. All this before returning the van at noon.
Of course we woke up a little late, threw on clothes in a rush (day #2 sans shower), and drove over to load up the van. Miraculously we got everything in (minus a metal bookcase and some artwork), but it was clear we weren’t going to be able to unload everything and get back to U-Haul by noon. At that point we both realized, eerily in sync, the van’s already packed. Why unload it today only to reload it all again next week?
It became pretty clear. Drive down to the city. Unload the van. Bring it back with the futon. And that’s just what we did, for the second day in a row. Listened to NPR on the way down. Unloaded in under an hour. And drove back to Santa Rosa, getting here with a half hour to spare before Stephanie’s 6pm Bye Bye Birdie rehersal.
Walking into the foyer, the bathroom with clawfoot tub is on the right. Et voila l’entree, avec a droite la salle de bain, et une baignoire a l’ancienne.From the bedroom, this is a glimpse of both bay windows. Depuis la chambre, une vue des deux fenêtres victoriennes.This is the bedroom bay window in all its glory. Et la, la fenêtre de la chambre dans toute sa splendeur.Looking out the window and down Pine Street. Le vue de notre rue, Pine St, typique San Francisco.Turning around in the bedroom and facing the foyer and living room. Et on se retourne, regardant dans la chambre, l’entree et le salon.Close up of the hardwood floor detailing. Detail du parquais.In the kitchen, there’s a door in the pantry door. Dans la cuisine, il y a une porte dans la porte qui mene a un petit cajibis.And finally for fun, I whipped together a floorplan. Et pour le plaisir, voici un plan de l’appart fait maison.
This is the 4th post in a series about finding an apartment in SF.
Two weeks ago, after coming back from the Fire Festival at 2 in the morning, Stephanie and I got up early and went down to the city to look at apartments together. We saw an expensive 4th floor apartment in ritzy Pacific Heights where the current tenant had left a giant bag of pot open on the kitchen counter. Nice. We saw a decent apartment with a rockin’ kitchen on 39th Ave, but it was a little too close to foggy Ocean Beach for comfort. We saw a loft with great views on the 12th floor of a large complex in the Tenderloin. It was appealing for its availability, but I wasn’t feeling the neighborhood (“known for its drug trade, prostitution, ethnic restaurants, and bar scene,” hawt!) or the density of the building.
Totally worn out, we drove a few blocks north, smack into the cuteness that is Polk Street in Nob Hill. We walked over to a creperie on the corner, shared a nutella and banana crepe, and tried to evaluate what we’d seen. After a few moments, we realized we really liked where we were. Right there. Right at that creperie.
Afterwards we took a walk around the neighborhood and realized Nob Hill was San Francisco to us. Close to downtown, but not. North enough to make getting to Sausalito a breeze. Comfortably residental, but still lively along Polk Street. Not touristy. Hilly, but not unwalkable. Did I mention perfect?
That night we got back to Santa Rosa and immediately hopped on Craigslist and narrowed our search to Nob Hill. Stephanie and I kept wondering, why hadn’t we looked for apartments here before? Sure enough, there were some open houses scheduled for Sunday. We contemplated going but didn’t commit—another trip down would make it our third that weekend (on top of my going down every weekday).
We also discovered another reality of Craigslist. Looking back over the neighborhoods we’d visited during the day, we noticed that some people list their open houses the day of! We never thought to recheck the ads before leaving that morning. I mean c’mon, Stephanie compiled the list Friday night!
So come Sunday morning the first thing Stephanie does is check for any new Nob Hill listings. Sure enough, there are a few. Some strangely without published open houses—instead they requested that we call for an appointment. Which we did, for several, with two definites later that afternoon. Which meant…we were going down to the city again.
Even before I knew I had a job at Federated Media in Sausalito, Stephanie and I were envisioning what it’d be like to live in San Francisco. In part for the experience (I’m frequently reminded that being young and childless is a prerequisite and a reason to move to the city), in part to ease the hour-long commute I’d incur working in Sausalito, and in part because Stephanie was ready for some new challenges after 5+ years of teaching dance in Santa Rosa.
Once I got the job, a plan began to take shape. We’d start looking for places in the city, Stephanie would start looking for work in the city, and we’d aim to move down in mid-August, when her last Santa Rosa obligation—choreographing a local production of Bye Bye Birdie—was fulfilled. The big challenge being that apartments in the city become available when they’re vacant or just shortly before. Meaning the person who’s able to move in earliest gets the worm. So very likely we’d need to give notice in Santa Rosa before we had a place in the city—30 days notice that would have to coincide with the first and the last day of whatever month we wanted to leave in, my landlord informed us. Hooray for overlapping rent!
Come July, Stephanie and I began to focus our initial search in the Mission. We didn’t realize it at the time, but something there just wasn’t clicking. Mostly it felt too far south of the places we knew, let alone Sausalito, my daily destination. Slowly our search migrated north. To Hayes Valley, then Cole Valley and the Haight, then Inner Richmond, even SoMa and the Marina. A lot of the search happened virtually. We’d fall in love with, then discard whole neighborhoods in the span of an evening on Craigslist.
And occasionally I’d do some reconnaissance after work, checking out a neighborhood, trying to squeeze in a promising open house.
One less than fruitful outing bears retelling. About 3 weeks ago I drove down to 21st street between Valencia and Guerrero (in the Mission). It took a while to get there, about 35 minutes from Sausalito—not a great replacement for my daily commute. When I got to what I thought was the address, I had to drive around 4 or 5 cars double-parked on the narrow two-way street. I thought I saw what looked like a crowd on the sidewalk, which I could only surmise was totally unrelated to some measly open house. Funeral maybe?
Miraculously I found a parking spot a street down and walked over. Turns out the crowd and their double-parked cars were there for the open house, which hadn’t started because the current renter hadn’t shown up to restrain his dog. When he did (about 40 minutes late), the crowd had swelled to nearly 30 people. It seemed that the probability of finding an apartment in this city was fast approaching zero. While waiting on the sidewalk I overheard things like this is worse than it was in 2000 and what was up with that kitchen on 23rd last week? It seemed like there was a loose band of hardened apartment hunters toiling unsuccessfully to find a place—a group I feared I’d soon be joining.
And then I walked into the apartment. It was a small 1 bedroom basement apartment. Probably less than 500 square feet. And it reeked of dog. It smelled SO bad I had to keep from breathing through my nose as I walked through. I could only imagine what the other 30+ people (who I let file in ahead of me), many of them couples, must have been thinking: how have we been reduced to this?
I visited two more places that night, each further south, and though I liked the wood burning stove next to stainless steel appliances in last one, it seemed that the early-30s couple who owned the house were auditioning the prospective renters. I was not in the mood. On a table in the kitchen was a sheet of unlined paper for people to leave their personal information—which had inevitably devolved into short essays about how much we love this apartment! I hightailed it out of there.
This is the 2nd post in a series about finding an apartment in SF.
Apartment hunting in San Francisco can be daunting. The first burden to overcome is learning the neighborhoods. Luckily, San Francisco is a relatively small big city, with 800,000 inhabitants in an area roughly the shape of a square, 7 miles on each side. Here’s a pretty decent map that outlines the major neighborhoods.
However, for the hands-down most accuracy (albeit at the cost of being a little busy), check out the San Francisco Association of Realtors MLS Map. It’s big, so here’s just a taste:
SFGate’s neighborhood guide is a good starting point, but I soon turned to my SF-based friends, family, and co-workers for any information they would share. What I heard again and again in response to the question “Where would you live if you could live anywhere” was “the Mission,” due to its concentration of young people, taquerias, nightlife, and sun. It’s not an area frequented by tourists, so not an area I’d spent any time in before. Which I liked.
I discovered an invaluable “guide” book intended solely for residents, rather than tourists, the aptly named, Not For Tourists Guide to San Francisco, 2006, which I highly recommend for demystifying San Francisco’s neighborhoods, in particular the areas where stores and restaurants coalesce. But don’t take my word for it, you can actually view the entire book online via a series of PDFs, for free. They even say:
Feel free to view and print these pdfs. If you’ve printed more than 20 pages, perhaps consider buying an actual book.
Very cool. But I digress.
The second burden is the cost of living. Currently (circa 2006) the rent for a 1 bedroom apartment (1 bedroom usually means a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen) starts at around $1400. A month. Most anywhere else in the country, that’s a respectable mortgage payment. On a 4 bedroom house. With a yard. And of course it only goes up from there.
The final challenge is just showing up. Since there isn’t a surplus of vacant rentals, a landlord can schedule a 1 hour long (or less) open house (sometimes with only a day or two’s notice) to show an apartment. If you can make it to the open house at the appointed hour, you show up. If not, well then that’s not the apartment for you. If you’re interested, they’ll provide a detailed rental application to fill out and fax back. It’s definitely worth filling out one of these for fun (they’re like personal history research projects) or at least compiling the phone numbers and addresses for current and previous landlords and employers.
Serious hunters will bring a checkbook with them, necessary for putting down a security deposit (as a measure of serious interest) as well as a recent credit report for each prospective renter (which can be got for free via annualcreditreport.com). With anywhere from 5 to 30 people stopping by in an hour’s timeframe, the pool of applicants (read: the competition) is too great for any landlord to want (read: need) to wait for any promised checks or applications.
In between open houses, fellow apartment hunters can be identified by the stack of ink-jet printouts of open house ads from Craigslist they’re carrying around. I felt a certain fraternity with these souls, knowing that I was doing exactly the same thing. Craigslist appears to have a corner on the rental classifieds market in San Francisco (and I presume many other cities). Aside from pounding the pavement, for many Craigslist is the first and last place to look for rentals.
Suffice it to say, for a dyed-in-the-wool maximizer like myself, this process has been a bit trying—and is compounded by the fact that I live an hour and a half away.
This is the 1st post in a series about finding an apartment in SF.
The cargo van was nice, much easier to drive and with much better visibility than the 10ft truck I’d rented last year. That and it was brand new. Only 250 miles on the odometer.
