apartment ho!

so after we blew into town late sunday night and crashed at jason and kate's (thanks again!and hooray for their recent engagement), we gathered our craigslist scribbles and pile of maps and headed over to the great city itself monday morning.

ok that was a few weeks ago so my memory is kinda shotty, but the bottom line is, wow, how the heck did we luck out like we did? we went to one place that was an instant NO, but shortly after went to two amazing open houses. the first, (which is the one i am writing this from now) was a beautiful little place near the top of the hill, next to the magnificent mission dolores park, with a great view, charming back patio and the cutest dog next door. if only it had a vest.

we spoke with jean (the landlord) for a while, telling her about ourselves (squirming in our pants that we were people she'd be interested in) and her telling us that she didn't even really want to have the open house that night because she had one that weekend and already had a lot of candidates. eek! but we took the applications (which she instructed us to fill out with as much personal info as possible) and crossed our fingers, as we skipped out of the apartment and on to our next open house.

man, we didn't think we'd ever see a place as nice, but whoa whoa did our eyes bug out when we saw this next one. it was one of i think four units that the landlord had completely gutted and refinished with new hardwood floors, granite countertops, claw foot bath tub and other period details. and yes, it even had a little back yard. so we rolled up our faces, schmoozed with the guy and his wife,asked for an application and ran to find a place to collect our amazements and quietly cry because we knew we didn't stand a chance at getting any of these apartments.

so we barted it back to oakland where we carefully crafted our applications. after we finished the one's for the second place, we faxed them off, and then continued to add cartoon doodles and essays about how we wanted to live in that first apartment more than we wanted a lifetime supply of soy delicious coconut craze. we packaged them up with a copy of donald's poetry book and tried to sleep even though it was harder than the night before my 9th christmas.

i get up. its 8.03am and i'm getting a phone call. its the landlord from the second place, saying that he's offering us the apartment and that we can move in right then! ACK! i freak out because um like yeah! even though its a super fantastic place... we really wanted to live in the other super oober doober place but we haven't even dropped off the application yet! so i ask him if we could let him know later that night and we fly over to the city to drop off the application to jean. we get there around noon and i leave her a voice mail explaining our situation and say, like, i know you think we're nuts but is there any way you think you'd be able to make a decision by oh lets say TONIGHT? so yeah now we're thinking our chances are really shot, and after like 6 more hours of nauseous anticipation, i give her a call to see if she's gotten my message. she says she has, and boy what a hard thing it is to try and make a decision, especially when she hasn't even called anyone's contacts or even read over everything yet but you know what? she's gonna let us know one way or the other by 8pm. what a doll. i didn't even care what she was going to call back saying -- i just hoped that she would be my new best friend because she is the awesomest lady i've ever met.

drumline... she calls back, fakes me out with her depressing voice but then says, "oh what the heck, im just gonna give the place to you guys. im going with my gut and you guys seem like nice people." hooray for jean's gut!

and now the much anticipated photos of our place! enjoy! (and thanks for being so patient, families)

this is the park near our place (during the few seconds when it's not overflowing with folks)

view from outside our apartment

the front of our apartment (middle right windows with the red curtain). thats my new harley btw

thats the front door and this is the uh sitting room (?)

another angle of that room

bedroom

check out that dresser (and dont be deceived by how big these rooms look. wide angle lens)

hallway that goes past the bathroom

computer room looking back towards front door

same room looking towards kitchen

kitchen pt. 1

kitchen pt. 2

little backyard patio cutesy face