House!

We have a house!! I wish I had pictures to share with you, but I don't yet, so you will have to settle for a verbal description (edit: and a roughly sketched floorplan) right now.

So I posted a "housing wanted" ad on Craigslist a while back, and I haven't been getting much feedback as a result. This is undoubtedly because I specifically said that we have two large dogs and would like a house with a yard for them, if possible. That's enough to scare most landlords away, I assure you.

Yesterday, we helped my friend John move into his new place in Oakland, and it is really, really great. I know we were both feeling pretty jealous - it's this awesome, great apartment that's bigger than our house now and has fantastic windows, a widow's walk, and a sun room, up on the third floor. It wasn't that much fun actually doing the moving, but that's what friends are for, and we were happy to help, it was just a lot of stairs for one day.

Anyway, we got home all sweaty and tired, and I checked my email and had a really nice email from a lady saying she's a dog lover with a house for rent in South Berkeley that sounds like it might work for us. I called her up, she happened to be there, and I rode my bike over to have a look at it.

Now, it's not that fantastic looking from the outside. That's not to say it's in any way ugly, it's just wholly unremarkable. But as soon as I walked in the front door, I was immediately impressed. It is so airy, bright, and cheerful, and even though there's no furniture in it, very homey. Just inside the front door is a little living room/sitting area, and to the right is a little dining nook. The whole front part of the house has vaulted wood ceilings with these great skylights. Then to the north of the dining area (the upper right quadrant of the front part, if you will) is the kitchen. I love the kitchen. It's somewhat set off from the front part of the house, in that there's a wall between it and the living room area, but it opens to the hallway on one side, and on the side that leads to the dining room, there's a little bar with these cool wine racks on top. Hang on, I'm going to draw a diagram of the floor plan, because this is getting confusing.


And oh, the skylights! If I remember right, there are two skylights over the living room, one over the dining area, and a big one over the kitchen. It's so bright and sunny, I loved it. And, I love this part too, the owner is a biologist, and she has a design in the shape of the Galapagos Islands on the kitchen floor! It is so cool! (The Galapagos is where Charles Darwin did most of his research, and with Roger and me both being very science-minded folks, we both loved this.) She actually worked in the Galapagos for three years, and when she redid the floor, she thought it would be cool to incorporate that part of her life into her new house.

Okay, right, so, all the floors are hardwood. (Yay for no carpet.) Down the hallway is a full bathroom immediately on the left, then the two bedrooms right across from each other, and at the end of the hall is a huge awesome rec-room. It's like a big family room, and we are so so excited about it. There will be room to have one corner be an office area, then one part will be a sitting area (eventually we want to buy a cool projector so we can have people over for movie nights), and we'll even have plenty of space left over for the dog crates to be in one corner. Then there's a utility room with a brand new washer and dryer and storage space along the side, and another half bathroom with an awesome brand new shower stall. I think we'll keep the nice air mattress we have now, and use the rec room as a guest room when people come to visit.

So at the end of the rec room is a big, nice patio door that leads to the back yard. The house is on a very long, narrow lot, so there's a somewhat narrow but decent sized backyard for the dogs, and it extends all along the side of the house for a nifty little dog run area. The fence is very nice and we won't have to worry about it falling apart! And there's an apple tree and a nectarine tree back there too, plus a garage that we won't be able to use, but that's fine. The owner is using it for storage for her stuff, and she said she can make some room for us too, but we'll never be able to put a car in there or anything.

I wish I had pictures to show you. It is so, so great, and we are so excited about it. It will be ready for move-in by July 15th, and I'll be sure to take pictures then. Oh, it's also about a half mile northwest of Ashby BART station, so Roger will be able to walk to BART to go to work! And it's even closer to campus than our house now, so I can easily walk, bike, or take the bus to get to class, just like I do now.

Ahhhhh relief. It was just getting to the point where we were getting a little antsy, and now of course we're really glad we waited. I kept telling myself all along that we should wait until we really find the right place for us, and we did and now it paid off!

So. Our new address, starting in mid-July will be 1633 Ward St, Berkeley, CA 94703. (If you type it into Google Maps and hit "Street View", you can get a look at the front of the house, if you're so inclined.) Easy to get to by public transit, lots of room for entertaining, no excuses for not having visitors!

Hooray!