Prepoceros

I haven’t mentioned this here yet, but I’m moving. Not far, just 20 minutes or so out of town, but I still get to pack up all my stuff and schlep it somewhere new.

My current lease expires at the end of February. Due to the Katrina-induced rental housing crunch here in H-town, if I were to stay where I am now, my monthly rent would jump up $119, from $695 to $814. That’s ridiculous. I think my current apartment company is pretty bitchy anyway, so now’s a good time to get out.

Right now I live near Rice Village and West University Place, a lovely little area, very college-y, yada yada. I don’t take as much advantage of it as I could, though, and now that I won’t be working in the office any more*, there’s no reason for me not to live out in the ‘burbs where it’s cheaper.

There’s a big shiny new pair of complexes along 288 on the way to Pearland that I drive past every time I go to Wendy and Michael’s house, and since Sammy’s vet is in Pearland, I figured I’d apartment-shop while I was in the area for his surgery last Thursday.

Turns out those places were full, but I found another nice complex NOT on the freeway which

1. has door-to-door trash pickup (here I have to carry my trash to the dumpster),
2. costs $20 less per month than what I’m paying now, or $139 less than what I’d be paying in March,
3. has a COMPLIMENTARY MASSEUSE on staff, and
4. is across the street from a Chick-Fil-A**.

Duh, right? So after school I went back and turned in my application. I’m signing a 14-month lease to start March 1.

Despite being outside the Loop Beltway, I won’t be any further from school, timewise, than I am now. Pearland-to-UH is a straight shot up the freeway, while WestU-to-UH requires going through the Med Center or waaaay around it, the streets of both of which are slow and clogged with traffic lights.

The one kink in the plan is that the lease I’m in now requires 60 days’ notice in writing before I can move out. Even the non-science majors among you will see that there are not quite 60 days left in February. What I’ll have to do is wait until March 1, when my lease will automatically switch to month-to-month (for the privilege of which I will pay an exorbitant amount of money), which only requires 30 days’ notice, then immediately sign an “intent to vacate” form so they’ll stop charging me March 30***.

Essentially I’ll have two apartments for the first thirty days of March, both of which I’ll be paying for*^. It’s not ideal, obviously, but I’m not going to sign a 12-month, $814 lease to stay here.

The upside is that I’ll have a whole month to move and clean out my old apartment instead of the day or two I’d have if I moved the ‘normal’ way. That means there’s more time to draw it out and procrastinate, too, but that’s okay. I’ll manage somehow.

Did I mention the masseuse? Because they have one, my new apartment complex. Complimentary. That means free.

———
* I haven’t told you about this either, have I? Remind me.
** This is a step down from my current complex, which is on the same side of the street as a Chick-Fil-A, but it’s comparable.
*** At the month-to-month rate, one day’s rent is worth almost $40, so nitpickiness is very much worth it.
*^ Because I turned in my app the same day I toured, my first month’s rent at the new place is only $200, so this isn’t as bad as it sounds.

Tags: miscellany

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 18th, 2006 at 11:02 pm and is filed under miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.