Especially great for longer stays
The best things about this apartment (and the other units Hamid rents) are:
1. Hamid! He is very responsive! He takes care of important maintenance issues quickly (usually within a day), even non-urgent things like hand soap, even though we told him he need not venture out immediately during the pandemic. He also provides many non-essential items we request – everything from a desk, which he got for the previous tenants and we said we’d rather he leave it here than take it out, and a kitchen island on wheels (we’re used to a much larger kitchen, but the island he brought makes meal prep easy for us), to extra kitchen supplies of the types we use (so two can work in the kitchen at once), and even a table for board games (did I mention we stayed here during the pandemic?). He is also very creative for finding alternate solutions for items he didn’t have (we didn’t want him to purchase non-essentials for us); for example, he put down cardboard on the tile walkway during a rainy stretch when we complained it was dangerously slippery.
2. Storage space! A large *empty* pantry, with pull-out shelves. Kitchen cabinets above the counters with 4 easily adjustable shelves in most, and pull-out shelves below the stove. Bedroom closets with shelves, drawers, and hanger-bars at different heights, making great use of the space available, which is ample. Plus dressers and other furniture in every room with drawers and/or storage behind doors.
3. Location! A great walkable neighborhood with grocery stores and restaurants very close by. Sidewalks everywhere. For those with dogs, there are patches of grass between the sidewalk and the curb along this and most blocks – in the last place we stayed we had to walk our dogs 2+ blocks away to find grass that belonged to the community/city and not a private house (yes, we clean up after our dogs, but we’re not about to let them pee on someone’s lawn), and within a week our small dog’s paws hurt so badly we had to bring him to a vet who prescribed antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and booties. But here we need only take them out front – though they’re usually happy to walk a ways here, with the small dog walking on the soft grass most of the time.
Other good things about this apartment:
- Great natural light. Most of the “windows” are actually doors (with a rail preventing you from walking out into nothingness) with full height glass. The bedroom windows are covered with lace that lets light in without letting others see in, and also have thick curtains over them so you can sleep in darkness.
- A/C!
- Well stocked kitchen includes about a dozen pots and pans in different sizes, a good assortment of cooking utensils and gadgets, and plenty of silverware, plates, bowls, cups, glasses, mugs, etc.
- The living room and primary master bedroom are spacious.
- Overhead lighting in every room.
Now the not-as-good stuff:
- The kitchen is small; however, the counter-top cart / island Hamid brought us makes it fully functional for two people to prepare meals together.
- Noisy appliances: the dishwasher, heat, and A/C all make much more than the usual noise, though all of these are most noticeable only in the kitchen. The washer and dryer sing their happy ending songs longer than you’d expect, and can’t be stopped by powering them off.
- The dishwasher is old and doesn’t work super well. The pot scrubber cycle doesn’t even put water in. My husband swears it’s the same model his mother had in the early 80s. 1980s.
- Although Hamid seems to always have good intentions, he’s not so good at estimating how long things take to do. When we checked in later than we’d arranged, he was still in the apartment with an assistant “upgrading” the apartment with new décor, and hadn’t cleaned it yet. When he gives a time he’ll come do some work in the apartment, he’s often much later than that.
- The double beds in the smaller master bedroom are old and very noisy. Hamid put some boards under the mattress which definitely helped with both the noise and the comfort, but they were still noisy and not very comfortable.
- There’s some water damage on the floor near most of the window/doors. OTOH, if the wood floors were pristine, we’d feel badly about having dogs there.
- There are no screens on the patio doors or “window” doors. However, there aren’t too many bugs around here so it’s not a big problem.
Overall, a great place to stay!