Almost Less Homeless

Yesterday I did something totally compulsive, and as I did I felt really adult, and really REAL, but also kind of silly and what-the-hell-am-I-doing. I went to see an apartment - though it turned out not to be an apartment, but the entire ground floor of a sweet little house, on a quiet dead end street.

I'll back up. I've been feeling that restless need-my-own-space thing again. It's been a year and change and I need to move on, get my own space going, nest in it, decorate and cook and be in MY bat-cave. So I halfheartedly have been surfing around classifieds and realtors and stuff, looking at what rents are about. And yesterday I got a hit.

So - on a whim, I called the realtor and made up to go see the place during lunch. Which was about 15 minutes later.

I go to their office, which is a little hole in the wall tucked away between a bank and a gas station. The place stinks like stale cigarette smoke and the sign in the window lists the Licensed Realtor as a man. But when I go in, there are 2 women there, a mother/daughter team I later figure out, who share the last name as that licensed realtor, but are not men. So I dont really know if they are licensed. Weird. So I file that observation away. And they are both smoking in my face when I come in, which I found rude and lazy.

Now, I had spoken on the phone with a woman whose voice is so ruined by cigarettes that her age is completely unable to be determined. She also lacks people skills, phone skills, and when I met her, fashion skills - except the lugged out Infiniti she drives which I found interesting, and gaudy. The agreement was that if I were to rent through them I needed to pay a fee of 10% of one year's rent to them. That was about $1680. Explains the infiniti...

We drive to the house. (After she got lost, asked for directions, and then got lost again before finding it - this after she was gushing all about it and how it looks, when it became quickly obvious she'd never ever been there - Third Strike) Ok - so now that I have set you up to understand how much I instantly didn't like or trust this Realtor - we get to the house.

It is airy, bright, lots of windows, nice paint job with nice colors, a private back porch, large backyard, driveway and private side entrance, and storage in half the basement, gorgeous wooden flooring in the dining/room area, washer and dryer hookup, a nice eat-in kitchen with wonderful amounts of cabinets and counterspace and a large king-sized bedroom with an odd little alcove/room off to the side of it to be used as a nursery, or computer room. The weird parts were the location of the only bathroom (near the back door off the kitchen) and the closets (in the hall near the front door), and the fact that I had to bring my own fridge (?).

I truly loved the space. I loved the yard, the large kitchen, the feeling of Homeyness that you don't quite get in an apartment, the owner was a nice older woman who seemed very sweet.

But I really didn't like the Realtor, and when it came down to it, the layout was really odd, and I haven't really gotten a handle on what I can afford in terms of rent + utilities + Life. And in the end, I balked. But for a little while, I was almost less homeless. And that was a nice feeling.