Intermission: Moving to the Marina District of San Francisco
I think that this past week and a half has been the most stressful part of my year so far. Why? Well it all started with my landlord calling us to inform that he’s selling our place and that, at the very least, we have a month until we have to move. The first thing that comes to mind is panic! The second thing that comes to mind is more panic because the holidays are coming up and this is the worst time of year to be finding somewhere.
This past two years we’ve been living in Emeryville (around where the road caught on fire and where Ikea and Pixar is located). Emeryville isn’t the best area, but it was very close to where I used to work, thus it seemed like a good idea to move there. Now I work in SOMA (South of Market, San Francisco), it’s a little far away, so we were planning on moving anyway, just in our own time.
After attending around five open houses, I came to realize that the situation was worse than I’d thought. Not only did most of the places suck, but many of them had lots of people bidding on them. Sometimes, contracts would be signed within the first five minutes of an open house. This whole experience was absolutely depressing. And to top it off, I don’t even have a credit history in the states yet (fyi: I’m British) as I don’t own a credit card yet and pay for everything with ATM (yes, I’m stupid, but I thought it was a good thing not to have any debt). So being picked out of large group of people was hard. The only thing I really had going for me was working for Sony.
Insolently, one of my co-workers was also moving. He was moving out of the Marina to buy a place in North Beach. So I asked if he could refer us to his landlord as good people to take over his old place. This all seemed like it would pay off, until we were informed that the rent on the place had gone up from 1700 to 2100 bucks!!! Crazy huh!?!
Just when it seemed that we were going nowhere, the building manager from the building in the Marina called. He informed us that there was another unit that had become available and as we had been previously refereed, our application would be bumped to the top of the pile if we were to apply. The only road block now was the units owner appreciating my status and lack of credit history.
So finally today, I get a call informing me that we have been approved and that we can move in soon. WOOOOOOO!!!!
