Ubiquitous Sunday Morning Post
finally we are one day away from being rid of tan carpeting and eggshell walls forever. yesterday afternoon, we picked up the truck and the temporary fence. now all we have to do is wait for the hours to pass. the sun is shining today and we are hopeful that the weather will hold out until tomorrow. it still seems very surreal to me, as if the house is really just another one we are renting and not our own. i tend to be the type of person that needs the physical to make some things real, so i am looking forward to the first night we spend in the house (tomorrow night!) reflecting on the way we’ve come since we moved here seven years ago. we’ve lived in multiple shabby apartments due to lack of finances, and at times bad judgement. here is the map of our renting history here in Seattle:
– June 1997: i arrived here with nothing more than a suitcase and about $1200 to rent an apartment and survive on. i had been planning on staying at a hostel until i could find a suitable place, but thankfully a friend offered to let me stay with him. i stayed there a month or so(?) in a house that i considered to be the really Real World. an assortment of characters that didn’t know each other and didn’t really care for each other, made for a very strange atmomosphere. a boyfriend and girlfriend living upstairs along with an acid dropping architecture major from Longview. on the main floor, a hippie type guy and downstairs a coke snorting deadbeat dead still trying to live his cool days (and looking much older than i’m sure he was).
– August 1997: found an apartment for $475, which now seems ridiculously cheap. but then it was really stretching me thin between student loan payments, credit cards and other such irresponsibility. the apartment was a studio, but with a separate bedroom. Mark moved out in October and we lived with absolutely nothing. i mean nothing. i think we had a bed and one pot and pan (remember all of my stuff was left behind in Michigan). the apartment came complete with an old landlord who would enter the apartment whenever he felt like it and domestic abuse next door neighbors. we lived right on the Ave (U-district) with all of its noise, bustle and excellent bus service to downtown.
– February 1998: we looked at a ground floor apartment on the west slope of Queen Anne that was considerably larger than our previous place. the apartment was slightly sunken on one side so that it was just a foot or so below the patio. there was a large patio and a nice little view of Magnolia. this was the winter it rained for 90 days in a row. we had more furniture at this point (but not much!) and we would open up the blinds and sit on the couch together watching the rain fall. it rained so often that year, we actually had to escape to Hawaii for a week. we experienced our first rat. unlike Michigan where tiny mice run amuck, rats are a facet of Seattle that is hard to escape. i wouldn’t let Mark kill it and captured it in a bin and then let it go free. (i can feel you cringing) eventually, my allergies and the growing out of the space forced us to look for our next place.
–March 2000: after much searching in a vacancy starved market, we settled on an 1100 sq ft apartment on Market in Ballard. the apartment was spacious and we had lots of guests and good times there. the downside, again it was a bit noisy and our nice manager was eventually replaced with a lazy, drunk one. so, again we decided to move on.
– February 2002: again, the market was horrible. we wanted to rent a house and leave behind shared floors/ceilings. although it was a little pricey, we rented a brand new townhouse in Sunset Hill (the neighborhood we hope to move back to someday). the townhouse really was very nice complete with a white picket fence in front. we hired movers this time and they assured me the couch would fit (yes, we had much more furniture by this time). despite their assurances that “they were professionals and could just tell”, the couch was definitely not making the turn off the landing. alas, we opted to store it in the garage. oh yes, there was a garage too. but, with the couch in the garage, it made the space about one foot short of our car actually fitting in to it! it certainly added insult to injury.
– February 2003: and here we come to the place i am sitting in right now. we decided that we wanted to buy a house and the way to do it was to save money for another year in a less expensive place. the market was a bit better and we knew we could probably get the same amount of space for a few hundred dollars less (not to mention save on utilities). the other requirement this time was that we wanted to be able to have a pet. a furry pet. preferably a dog, but we would settle for a cat. although we wanted to stay in Ballard/Sunset Hill it had become a little trickier. Sunset Hill doesn’t have many rentals because it is predominantly comprised of beautiful houses and Ballard has now become the “it” neighborhood. we find a place, but it’s already been rented and we opt for one of the few places that will allow a dog without a weight maximum. it sits above the Piper Creek watershed and a lovely path to Carkeek Park, but it is strangely laid out and not as clean as we’d like when we move in. we quickly realize it’s not ideal, but we also realize nothing is ideal anymore because we need to buy a house!
and now we arrive at the house we bought just 5 minutes from here (and too close to Central Market to be good for us). three bedrooms, hardwood floors and huge backyard for dog romping and gardening.
and they all lived happily ever after. the beginning.
