Joe and his place were both great. The place itself is very functional, is in a great location, and will have the vast majority of what you’d need for both a short term and long term stay (we stayed for a month). Location is walking distance to Loro, Bouldin Acres, and other great spots on South Lamar, and if you wanted to make it work, places like Gibson’s on Lamar as well. The neighborhood is very nice and very amenable to walks, though I’d say a general comment is you probably want a car in Austin. Uber rides were pretty cheap most of the time but definitely not always, and Austin is fairly spread out. Uber rides were like 15 minutes downtown to East 6th st. Parking at the place is easy. The internet worked very well the entire time, and given the layout of the place, two people could definitely do a Work From Home escape here and not be right on top of one another (that’s what we did). The master bed is a king and was very comfortable and the second bedroom bed was a queen and was pretty solid too (though definitely not as comfy). The TV was a bit old and probably in need of an upgrade but it worked with Hulu, Netflix, etc. just fine. One really nice feature was the double oven in the kitchen, which is super useful for cooking, which we did a lot during the weeks. We got packages delivered very seamlessly and you have access to the mailbox as well, which was great. Generally, Joe’s got almost all the bases covered.
The biggest issues were: the dogs across the yard from the Master bedroom window, which barked a ton and sometimes would do so either very early in the morning or very late at night. I get it, they’re dogs and dogs bark and a lot of people have them, but it was almost once a day they’d go on a pretty loud, random barking spree, and sometimes it was early in the morning. This was pretty annoying considering how loud they were (I think there was at least 3), especially if you’re trying to sleep in at all (which to be clear I tend to mean past 7). Second, I was definitely bummed there wasn’t at least a small grill to cook burgers and stuff like that in the backyard (another sneaky nice feature of the house by the way…cooking dinner and having it out in the backyard when it’s warm would be awesome and we should have done this more). Third, it was regrettably cold a decent amount of our trip so was also a bummer the fireplace wasn’t actually active and working. The place in general isn’t really built for winter (which makes sense given how short real winter is there), so it did get pretty chilly in the living room, though the heating definitely did work well (especially upstairs). Fires a few nights would have been awesome though given this. Lastly, the lighting in the place downstairs isn’t great, which probably was partially intentional given more lighting = more heat from outside and since Austin is hot most of the year, that’s not what you want. This had the effect of us just wanting to get outside even more though, even on iffy days. If you stay here March - November, this likely isn’t going to be an issue for you though.
Overall, I’d highly recommend staying here for both a short term and long term trip. This place has everything you’re likely to need, is in a fantastic location, and Joe was a super accommodating and very responsive host. We’ll definitely look to stay here again.