cww.blog!

When I woke up yesterday, in my hotel room in Secaucus, New Jersey, I was frustrated at my lack of progress in finding an apartment to rent. I headed to Starbucks as I had the previous morning, and with my now-usual tall four-shot americano and one of their tasty multi-grain doughnuts, I booted my laptop, put my engineer's pad on the table, and readied my pen.

Before I went to sleep the previous evening, I had scanned the listings at Apartment Guide for digs in the farther reaches of the suburbs, and they seemed to be worth checking out. So, that was the first place I looked.

Rather than finding seemingly good places in the 60+-minute-commute suburbs, however, some apartment complexes in Newark caught my eye. Upon further investigation, they all turned out to be in the nicer part of Newark, more than five miles north of the big, noisy, polluting Newark International Airport. For a distance comparison, the Robinson suburb of Pittsburgh, with all the chain restaurants and big box stores, is five miles from Pittsburgh International Airport. Houses there are relatively upscale, and there is virtually no airplane noise.

I settled on the northernmost of the three apartment complexes I considered in Newark. My new apartment is on the 12th floor and has a sweeping view of Manhattan and the hills to the north. On clear nights and days, that's going to be super-cool. You'll definitely see some pictures of my view, posted here on my blog.

After applying for a lease on that apartment and having the agent hold it for me, I headed to the Starbucks in downtown Newark, relieved that my search had finally ended and craving a congratulatory couple shots of espresso. For those of you who have spent time in Pittsburgh's east end, you may find it interesting that downtown Newark is like East Liberty but all grown up. And nicer and with lots more grass. The kind of grass you walk on.

Eight or nine hours later, I was back in Pittsburgh, tired and ready for bed.

What's the next step? To decide one of the following three things.

1. To call the apartment complex in Newark and ask for a two-bedroom apartment instead of a one-bedroom apartment so I can store all my stuff there.

2. To ask the big long-distance movers if they can store most of my stuff in a container for six months and only keep a single car-load of stuff at my new apartment.

3. To hire a portable storage company like PODS or SMARTBOX to handle the moving and the storage, again keeping only a car-load of stuff at my new apartment.

4. To rent a storage unit in Pittsburgh or Newark, to and from which two separate moves would be performed, again keeping only a car-load of stuff at my new apartment.

I'm leaning toward option 3, since it seems to balance economics and ease pretty well. Some of those portable storage companies will even pack the container for you! The only problem with those things is you normally have to get city permits to keep them on the street for any amount of time, and I'm sure that's a huge hassle. Then again, if they're professionally packed and unpacked, they wouldn't have to be on the street very long.

Ah, this whole moving process is just a pain. I'll be so incredibly relieved when it's all over!