I hate apartment hunting.  It puts you in a position where you are completely subservient to the whims of landlords and have to write checks for “application fees” that come with little justification and no possibility of refund.  Oh, and since every application comes with them pulling your credit report, each one dings your credit score a little bit, meaning that you’re basically paying to reduce your chance at each subsequent application.

On top of THAT, every landlord expects you to be ready to start paying rent the same day you walk in to the place, and yet expects you to give 30 days notice when you move out – so, you’re faced with either giving notice before you’ve found a place, and hoping that you can go through the whole process in less than a month, or paying rent on two places for a month.

Mind you, it’s nothing on the system in Japan, where you pay out approximately four months worth of rent as, basically, bribes, but it’s still pretty annoying.

And, yes, it’s possible that I’m simply not very good at the moving thing.

But.

We found a rather nice place in Eugene, put in an application and got accepted on the first pass, so we aren’t faced with going through multiple apartments, they’ve waived the rent through the end of the month and given us a rather sizable discount for signing a 12 month lease, so things are looking up.

Now we just have to move an awful lot of stuff into an apartment that is just a little bit smaller than the one we’re in now.  This is where we see whether all the organizing and purging we’ve done over the last few months has actually paid off. 🙂