In a perverse way, my boyfriend and I are moving to make his housing costs cheaper and mine more expensive. Currently I pay my boyfriend $800 a month in rent including all utilities. The rental we have signed is $1850 a month, so my expenses will turn into $925 plus utilities and a tiny bit extra for gas every week. It’s just a bit further from my office than our current situation, but not much. For my boyfriend, renting out his home for over $2K a month, but only paying $925 a month in rent means he has more money to take me to dinner! (Just kidding. He’ll be saving it so we can buy another place in the near-future.)
Because boyfriend and I aren’t into super luxury remodels and we’re on a serious budget, we looked in some areas of DC that are still a bit sketchy or else really far from Metro stations. But I nixed the far away areas because of my commute. (I am not yet ready to change my job to work downtown.) Instead we lucked into a severely under-priced rental that’s not too far from where we currently live.
We had looked at a cute place two blocks away from our current house, but the landlady balked and decided to sell her place rather than sink any work into making the home an appropriate rental. The landlord at our signed rental almost discouraged my boyfriend from coming to see the house, but the price was way too good to pass up. (Plus it’s so hard to find a 2-car garage anywhere in DC with a rent under $5K a month.) Part of the reason why the place is so cheap is that it needs a lot of work. The kitchen is not much bigger than the kitchen in my studio and the appliances are quite old.
Unfortunately there was a lot of competition for this rental, as there was on another place we saw in LeDroit Park. However, boyfriend and I decided in advance how much we’d be willing to offer the landlord in exchange for for some updates on his rental. The main thing is that the landlord’s home had been destroyed as a party house by the previous tenant and we created a specific list of items that had to be done before we could move-in. Most of the things we wanted were items the landlord was already planning to do like refinishing the floors, but we added a few things to it, like removing the security bars on the windows.
We also signaled that we were interested in staying for two years and we’re homeowners ourselves so we aren’t going to be trashing his place. (The landlord had clauses like ‘Will keep windows and doors shut when there is snow or rain.’ Which seems self-evident, but apparently it’s not.)
The hope now is that the landlord will finish all the work and we can rent out boyfriend’s house for August 1st. Wish us luck. We’ve already had a few people tromping through the place and I’m sick of being super tidy.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
