Have I Complained Enough About This Rental House?

My answer to that question will be – it’s never enough.

The lease for this rental house is for a year in total, and now I have about 4 months to go. Maybe I will complain about this house until the day I move out, as was the case when I complained about my temporary fully furnished apartment in San Mateo, until the day I moved out. One would think that I should have learned my lesson the first time – i.e. for a place to live I should be very careful and extremely picky. But obviously all the lessons are saved for the next house, which I will buy as opposed to rent.

Talking about renting, our tenants in San Diego have caused us plenty of headache. They are surely incompetent when it comes to fixing anything, but I would think that incompetent people tend to be super careful as well, since they themselves cannot repair anything. But they are not. As a result, we have paid the handy man many times to go in to fix something, to the point that our agent finally asked for a cushion fund so that the handy man can get paid before the monthly rental check is due.

Our landlord here in Bay Area, on the other hand, would not fix anything unless he himself can check out if something is really broken. That sent me into a fury when both the washer and dryer were broken, and he insisted tossing a wet towel into the dryer for at least 30 minutes for a test. This house was built about 10 years ago, but apparently was made from cheap materials with poor design. It’s by a noisy street, which somehow I did not notice when I decided to rent this house. Poor Winston must have got woken up plenty of times when he was a newborn by the loud motorcycles in the day time. There are stairs to lead up even to the first floor, and as a result, it makes it very hard to load and unload groceries. The sound proof quality is especially poor, so that the nanny does not even dare to flush the toilet at night for fear of waking up Winston. There is no park nearby, and no downtown area accessible. The windows look either directly into the neighbors’ houses, or into the slanting slope that leads up to the street level. No wonder I don’t like to stay home if I can avoid it. While it’s got 4 bedrooms, somehow I always feel as if it’s much smaller than our 4-bedroom house in San Diego.

Out of wishful thinking, I have been looking online periodically to see where I would like to live, even though we still have another 4 months left in this rental house. Now that I have made two mistakes when it comes to housing in Bay Area, I am surely not going to make a third mistake. It has to be brand new or recently remodeled; it has to have somewhat of a view; it has to be in a warmer climate; it has to be close to either parks or downtown area; it has to have reasonable designs; what needs to be big (i.e. closets, size of toilets, dining room, bedrooms) should be big; what needs to be narrow (e.g. hallway, standing space in the bathroom, stairs) should be narrow; what needs to be strong (e.g. water pressure, showers, fires of the kitchen range) should be strong; it cannot be next to a busy street; and hopefully, it will bring a smile to my face when I get in every day, as was the case with my house in San Diego.

Is that wishful thinking here in Bay Area?