Cereal Monogamist

House hunt update

Friends and family know that we are currently looking for a new place to live. Here’s the latest news on that.

We decided against all of the six places we looked at several weekends ago. Jeremy had found a really promising post on Craigslist and we pursued that place for a few weeks. We toured it, we liked it; we met the neighbors, we liked them. We played phone tag with the landlord for a long time, and it soon became abundantly clear that she really wasn’t interested in housing us (i.e., people who wanted things like broken screen doors and vomity old carpet fixed) or our dog.

Of course, it was all her right, but it made me angry, especially the unwarranted dog hate. In fact, she suggested to us that non pet-owning tenants would have had all the problems with the place fixed no question, but that people with a (mature, house-trained) dog don’t deserve a new carpet. (From our discussion with the neighbors, also tenanted by this woman, we learned that people with small children don’t deserve a new carpet either.)

Well, Jeremy found another place (Craigslist having a basically endless supply of duplexes and small houses for rent in the area) and we looked at it on Saturday.

It was lovely. Two bedrooms instead of three (the other place had three) and about 50 bucks more a month, but it’s in a slightly nicer neighborhood and had several things to recommend it—a huge kitchen, built-in shelves in the living room, and tons of storage space, among other things. We told the landlady, who was showing us around, that we were interested and asked for an application.

This is the point when the previously normal-seeming landlady turned from Dr. Jekyll into Mrs. Hyde. (Hyde’s the bad one, non-readers.)

Click ahead for more.

Among the utterly antisocial, “if people don’t like me it’s their own problem” behaviors exhibited by the landlady:

• She insisted that we accompany her to a coffee shop to fill the application out with her. This was made complicated by the fact that we had the dog with us, and it was about 120 degrees, so leaving her in the car was not an option. The landlady didn’t much care about this development, but luckily, the coffee shop had a back patio and the people there were hugely welcoming of Sky, even bringing her a saucer of water which she slurped up contentedly.
• While parking at the coffee shop, she called to us from her car that it was pay parking. Which we could clearly see. The spot we pulled into had some time left on the meter, which Jeremy mentioned to her as being a lucky break. She narrowed her eyes like he was trying to pull one over on her. She also asked, “Are you sure?” like identifying whether a parking meter has time on it or does not have time on it is an acquired skill that she felt Jeremy lacked.
• When she read my signature she said, “what are these letters here? No, what are they?” even though my printed name was right above the signature. When I spelled the name, she painstakingly wrote her own “e” and “r” in the margin above the signature.
• After about thirty minutes, Sky began to get antsy laying on the cement floor of a coffee shop patio and began nosing around and straining against her leash, trying to walk around. I tried to get her to relax with some “sit”s and “lay down”s which she often obeyed, but only momentarily. (For the record, the dog had not barked, snarled, bucked her leash, or exhibited anything even closely resembling bad behavior; she was just impatient.) After suffering this in silence for several minutes, the landlady began sermonizing to us about dog training and all the ways we were failing to properly discipline the dog.
• We filled out the apartment application, which asked for a huge amount of secure information that we unwillingly provided. She narrowed her eyes at our pitiful salaries and then demanded that we write down our parents’ addresses. She told us it was important for her to have them in case we “took off in the night.”

So. The status of our house hunt is this: we are hoping to get that house, and at the same time fearful that we will get it and be under contract to this woman.