Looking for a place

Finding the right place to rent turned out to be more discouraging than I'd expected. Describing Astoria in a few words is not so simple. I've never found the town that easy to categorize, so I won't try to generalize it now. I'll have a lot more pictures and descriptions as time goes on. I was on a budget, and I needed to find an apartment fast. But I'd been doing that all my life, looking for houses and apartments on a budget. I'd only owned my own place for a brief few years in Palisade, and even when we found that, we were renters first - and on a budget. But, except for the experience in Palisade, where we were looking for a pet-friendly place, I've never felt I had as few choices as when I came here. I was told it was not yet the season when rentals opened up. Still, the one I finally took was the only one I would really have wanted to live in. I don't know what I'd have done if it had not been for that one apartment. I've never seen as many "available and ready" apartments that had so much wrong with them. Let me emphasize: I'm not talking about the slums. Astoria has no slums. This was not even in a "bad part of town." There's virtually none of that, either. It's just inscrutable Astoria, and I had no clue about any of it yet.

Kate had gone out and gotten us a newspaper, but we arrived in Astoria on the weekend, and the place that looked most promising (the one I finally took) wasn't available to look at until Monday. I told the lady it really, really sounded good, and they'd just lowered the price on it, too, because it had been empty too long. But meanwhile, we went out looking for backups or for something that might be better. I'd hate to wait till Monday and then find out I didn't want it. We looked at several. All of the photos on this page are from one apartment. We had to drive out to a neighboring town to pick up the key at a rental agent's. I actually liked the place, and might have taken it despite the work that had to be done to make it livable. It had a lot of space for the money and a decent view. The layout was purely weird. The way each room connected to the next, and sometimes the actual shapes of the rooms were like a bizarre labyrinth. I found it charming, if somewhat confusing. I couldn't believe they were showing it in this condition, but the windows could have been fixed.

The fridge (yuck) could have been patched up or replaced.

The screens could have been put back on or thrown out.

And the door fixtures could have been replaced. I think the two things that finally turned me off about this place were that although it was an upstairs apartment, it was on such a hill that anyone could have stepped from the back lawn into the house through unsecured windows in back. I'm not sure why that seemed more unfixable than the other problems, but maybe the rental company had already said they wouldn't do anything about it. I don't remember. The worst turn-off was the smell of cat pee on the landing and the fact that I'd have to haul everything up a steep flight of narrow stairs. After giving a lot of thought to the space and the charming funkiness, I said, "No." I'm so glad I did.

Other possibilities had included a teeny, dark basement apartment with mould in it and neighbors that I hadn't felt good about, an apartment of a decent size, but it had zero charm or character and was totally flat and uninteresting inside. It had a bit of a view, but not much. I know myself. I'd get massively depressed in a very short time. Funky works. Bland is intolerable. There was also a much smaller apartment with the same issues, only worse (these were both built in this half century with tacky carpets and horrible cabinets). The the other one I looked at was old and funky and charming, and I almost liked it. Again, the layout was weird. I didn't realize that this seems to be a prevalent feature of Astoria living. Like the first, it was upstairs, long and narrow. The banister rocked and nearly came off in my hand, but I think the real problem was that it had no stove or fridge, and neither did I. I can't remember what else about it bothered me; I think I could have enjoyed it and made interesting use of the space (especially as a studio) but we waited till Monday and hoped for something better. In hindsight, I wish I'd taken more photos. Looking for digs in Astoria can be either really entertaining or really distressing. When you realize that the pix on this page were of a place I LIKED, you get the idea.