Finding a place to live in California

Since we dont know anyone we had no idea where to start with anything. We knew what general area we were going to live in but without any knowledge we had to guess. We were sure we didnt want to buy a house, we were going to rent to start off and figure out what area we really want to live in.

The area we are in is called Northern California and I have also heard the East Bay area. We are between Sacramento, Napa and San Francisco. There are tons of towns in the area.  We knew where the job was going to be so it was a matter of finding a place not to far away. Friends from work gave suggestions of course but we ended up staying in the Vacaville area. It reminds me of a mixture of 'city' and 'rural' area.  Sort of in between the two.

Now in New York we grew up in the city so there were dozens of buildings were hundreds of people lived, corner bodegas, pizzerias, chinese places galore. Public transportation was a skip away! Many places were open 24 hours, you know NYC.  Well most recently we lived about an hour and a half north west of the city.  A tiny town called Florida, New York.  What I mean by tiny was that there are two traffic lights and side walks were only found just a bit past the traffic lights.  We lived just outside the village and there were no sidewalks, no public transportation, no corner bodegas and everything basically closed by 9pm, even the gas station was closed by 10pm.  We had to drive 7 miles to the nearest supermarket, or well over 12 miles to get to major stores.

When I came out to visit we drove around to the little towns around and we liked Vacaville the best.  There are sidewalks, there is public transportation, and a ton of shops.  Walking around was a plus.

We weighed in on renting a house or renting in an apartment complex. Here is my list of pros and cons for both:

Renting a house meant:  You get a house to live in, no one living under you or above you, majority of the houses out here have fenced in yards, somewhat private, rural, maybe safer. However dealing with a home owner may not be the best, many of them list with a real estate company which mean additional fees, they require a deposit equal to the rent, they ask for an additional deposit if you have pets, some of them want two months deposit, the houses are what we like to call on top of each other, there is very little property between the homes, renting a house means the renter is responsible for mowing the lawn, watering the lawn, basically maintaining the home your renting.  Homeowner can sell the house at anytime leaving you potentially homeless.

Renting an apartment:  Your in a community, almost all the complexes we viewed had a pool, gym, play area, community room, none of the complexes are higher then 3 stories, then again none of them had elevators either, many are more centralized and therefore closer to shops and more, the deposits are a lot less, they do ask for an additional deposit for pets. The issues: You have people either on top of you, beneath you or both, if your on the first floor you will have more people 'looking in' so a lot less privacy - some people put up these bamboo looking fence, if your building allows smoking and your neighbor under you choose to smoke especially on the balcony the smoke will travel up, if you have pets they all have some type of pet restrictions - on weight, the quantity, the breed, and more. They also all ask for PET RENT! This is extra money you have to pay a month in addition to your rent! Some of them charge it per pet!  If you want a designated parking spot you have to pay more for a carport spot or garage space. The lease was close to 40 pages long, READ IT! They have rules on satellite TV and some ask for an additional deposit for that. The 'rules' are just crazy - the lease says you cant use those sticky hook things that dont make holes on the walls, they have a specific way you are allowed to hang something in the walls and more. We have nothing on the walls they are bare but we have passed others with things in their walls, guess they dont care lol.  This complex had individual water meters per apartment, many of them are grouped by building and then averaged out. So if your in a building with people that dont care about water you could end of paying a lot more then your actually using which I thought sucked.

When we finally found a place that we thought was a good fit we applied. Now we had to pay $40 per person apply, if our kids were over 18 we would have to pay for them too!  We then went out to the movies while our papers were being processed. Imagine our horror when we got a call telling us we were denied. Shocked we had to investigate and since it was the weekend we couldnt do anything about it till Monday. We were so pissed. This company called On-site does the processing, apparently its popular on the west coast to use this company. We finally found out why we were denied. They informed us that this company that did a check on us says we have a judgement for non payment of rent in 2006. Actually I had it under my name!  We said its impossible since we have owned a home since 2002 and recently had our credit reports printed because of some other things we knew there was nothing there.  I finally was able to get the actual report and it showed two peoples name that was not mine nor my husbands name. The strange thing was one of the persons names for the judgement had my middle name as a first name and my maiden name as a last name. So again even more pissed I finally called the company Monday morning to complain, the person I spoke too actually laughed and said yes I can see this person is not you and was going to delete it and resubmit it.  We were waiting again another day before they gave us to go ahead.

Applying to another place would have given us the same issue as they ALL use the same company.  We would have lost another $80 applying again.  The other thing we didnt like was how the other complexes were operating.

When we asked about the rent we were told they run on supply and demand.  Confused we asked what they were talking about. Turns out during the summer is peak mainly because of school zones (people moving to get their kids into a certain school - being zoned is better apparently - more on school later) , they have a lot of demand and low supply which meant the prices of the rent will rise. From the first day the DH looked at the apartment and a few days later when we went together about renting the price went up by almost $100.  This is apparently normal.  If its winter there may be more apartments and not enough demand so rent will be lower. It just didnt make sense to me and I thought that was horrible. The apartment complex we ended up with had a flat rate for the apartments and that was it, I liked that!

We've lived in this place for about 6 months and we like it so far. The office is great with collecting packages if your not home, the maintenance guys arrive pretty quickly, its fairly quiet, we can walk to restaurants, shops and more, theres a pool and BBQ area! What I dont like is people do not pick up after their pets and we have stepped in poop a few times, when it rains the dirt smells! Now it only rained once but it was horrible smelling.  There are stray cats everywhere! People seem to move in and out A LOT. Now there are military families in the area so that could be the reason. No one seems to chat with anyone else, it is kind of discouraging.

Since moving out here we have found out so many things I have decided that Im going to blog about it.  It sucks to have to find things out when its too late or because you had no idea!

Moving from NY to CA

Earlier in 2013 we found out that we were moving to California. It was not a planned it was more unexpected, a surprise - a shock lol.

The DH went to California on his first business trip for 2 weeks during Easter, it quickly turned into 3 weeks. All he could tell me was how fantastic and beautiful it was, the people we nice and they loved him there, the weather was perfect, and then he says theres a job opening for exactly what he does.

I quickly said why dont you apply and see what happens, imagine how surprised we were to see he was offered the job and a transfer was in process, We were moving to California.

Now I always wanted to move out of New York but most New Yorkers move south on the east coast not the west coast lol.

He returned back to NY and stayed for only about 2-3 weeks and was gone again. In a short time I had to sell all the things in our house, put the house up for sale, pack and plan a move. They put him in a hotel and gave him a rental car for a few months. Time was quickly running away from us.  At first I was going to stay in NY till October as I had previous commitments booked and I felt bad having to cancel events. Then there was our child, should I have her go to school in NY for a few months and then move?

In the end we cancelled those events and decided to move in August. It turned out the week we picked was still bad as school had started in the middle of the month so she was  going to miss a little over a week of school.  The school district told us to register her for school on August 1st even though she wasn't going to attend right away but to insure she was able to attend.

After much research we shipped the DH motorcycle, drove across in my Prius and used ABF to get our stuff that we were taking to CA.  Now we got rid of all our furniture, sold, donated and threw away a ton of stuff!  There were many options to this, at first we were going to rent a truck and tow my car, we even thought of using one of those pods but that was even more. To rent a truck it meant over 1K in just gas, plus around 3K for the rental and tow, not counting the hotels, meals and where exactly were we going to place our two cats and dog. We thought of using pods and fly but that was even more.  We found ABF which allowed us to use truck space and it was hauled. It was based on space used which made sense.   It was more expensive if they took the truck to us to load and unload so what we did was rent a truck to load, drive it up to the ABF station and load the ABF truck. We reserved 15 feet of space and ended up using only 9 which was fantastic! We saved a lot of money doing it this way, thing was it meant that when our stuff got to CA we had to rent another truck, load it from the stuff off the ABF truck and drive to our new place.

It sounds a bit crazy loaded and unloaded multiple times but it worked out and it was a lot cheaper then any other way we found. We loaded the ABF truck on a Friday it arrived the following Monday. It was not that bad, our stuff shifted a little bit and some containers sank and bent out of shape but I dont think anything actually broke on us.

Renting the truck locally was a flat rate plus milage, plus replacement gas on both ends of the trip, the ABF truck quoted us for 15 feet and had an adjustment of $119 for each foot taken away or added. The truck cost about $100 on each side, the ABF truck cost just under 3K.  Our Prius cost about $200 in gas, hotel and food we were going to pay no matter which if we drove the car or truck ourselves.

So our journey began on route 80 heading west.