Touring the Rental House

As mentioned in a previous blog, we're renting a house out here in northern Los Angeles while we find a place to buy.  Since we knew we'd need a place that allowed big dogs and we only wanted a short term lease, we realized that our rental options might be somewhat limited, and indeed, Chris found himself scrambling until the week before he was scheduled to move to secure a location.  Accordingly, our standards were set on the lower side for the rental house: it had to have at least 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, it had to be safe, and it had to have a gated/fenced backyard for the munchkins.  That was pretty much it.

Enter our new abode on Forestdale Avenue:

It's a cute little house, and it is serving our needs perfectly well.  It has the 3 bedrooms and 2 baths we asked for, plus the gated/fenced/walled backyard, and it's within a short distance of many things we're enjoying - remember Flappy Jack's?  Also, it's .3 miles to the LA Fitness, several other restaurants are within a half mile radius, downtown Glendora is only 1 mile away, and I was recently able to ride my bike to the larger shopping area with the big box stores (I rode my cruiser bike to Bed, Bath and Beyond to buy my brother Jim a chef's knife for his birthday - we're such a cute little hipster family!), which is 3 miles one way.  It's super convenient, that's for sure.  

As much as the house is meeting our needs, it does have some weird little quirks.  Our landlord is great, and she and her team are generally on top of what we need.  She's been renting this property our for 20 years, and since she's a bit lackadaisical about what occurs in the house, past tenants have made some interesting "improvements" in the past.  With that bit of foreshadowing, on with the tour!

Okay, pictures!  When you walk in the front door, you step into the living room:

That's the front door behind Harley,
up there at the top of the shot.
One of the bonuses of living in a 1050 square foot home -
at least one dog in every picture.

As you walk through the living room, you get to the dining room...

Which has big picture windows
and a sliding glass door into the backyard.
We can sit here and watch hummingbirds at the feeder.

We're such fun old people!

The view out the sliding door to the back yard.

...and the kitchen is immediately to your right:

Bonus points for anyone who recognizes our main cooling unit
as the beer fridge that lived in our garage.

Only the oven and dishwasher were in the rental when we moved in,
and we didn't want to buy a fridge,
not knowing what our eventual real house would have.
Hence, the beer fridge.

If, instead of walking to the kitchen, you turned right before the dining room, you'd come to a hallway that leads to the bedrooms:

Kaylee, doing a great The Shining impression.
Wow, that's creepy.  I just got chills.

I'm going to think about something else now.

Also, that's the other opening to the kitchen on the left.

Opening on the right of the hallway is the room we're using as the spare bedroom:

Bonus shots!  Remember from a few blogs back about how we couldn't fit the box spring for the full mattress into the POD and we donated it with Matt's help?  Well, here's us assembling the new one we ordered.  Since we can take this one apart, it will FOR SURE fit in any future storage options:

wow

so help

much assistance

The engineer in his natural habitat

Back to the hallway!  When you come to the very end (all of like 10 steps), the master bedroom is off to the right:

It's a pretty tight fit in here,
but we're making it work.

To the right of Chris' dresser is the entrance to the en suite bathroom.

The shelving unit was there when we moved in,
which is being handily employed,
as you can clearly see.

The night we moved in, we immediately hung up the shower curtain in this bathroom, which has just a shower stall.  We didn't figure this would be an issue, until I took my shower and the small width of the stall coupled with the goose-neck shower head resulted in me washing up while my nose was pressed to the wall of the stall.  Since Chris takes up more room than I do, we figured this wasn't going to work and immediately relocated our shower items to the other bathroom, where they've stayed.  Some staged shots:

As you can see, this shower is better put to use
as a hanging area for my hydration pack.

On the adjoining wall of the master bedroom is the office, where I spend the vast majority of each day:

That's my name plate!

The second bathroom is right next to the office.  This is good, because unless I wander to the kitchen for a snack, Kaylee can position herself in the office doorway and see me for 90% of my day.  Otherwise, she has to follow me around, trying to figure out what I'm up to, and this is obviously exhausting.

She's done.

Looks like a bathroom, non?

After looking at these pictures, you may be asking yourself, "Self, where did Amy and Chris put the rest of their crap?"  Thankfully, we do have a private, two car garage outside, and that's where most of the books/holiday decorations/garage-yard stuff/other furniture is currently located:

As you can see, the Prius still fits, too.

Our new neighbors were amazed by this:

"You can fit your car in the garage?!?!?"

We think they have too much junk.

Continuing around the outside of the house, here's the backyard:

The view from the porch toward the back wall.

You can see the raised garden planter to the left -
it was already there, which is awesome.

The fence on this side of the yard is all wire,
but it's covered in years of growth of ivy.

This is good, as there's an outdoor dog
that lives on the other side of the fence.
More on him in a moment...

Some little plants I put in the garden box.
Basil, jalapenos, and tomatoes.
I added a shade cover (it's a tarp),
so the basil and tomatoes are doing well,
but the pepper doesn't like it.

A view looking toward the garage -

lots of rose bushes on the left side of the picture.

A few cuttings from the rose garden.

As mentioned in a photo caption above, an outdoor dog lives in the yard on the south side of the house; actually, dogs live on both sides of us.  While we don't know the name of the dog on the south side, the dog on the north side is Sadie; we know this as we often hear Sadie's Mom go, "dammit Sadie!  Stop barking!"  I'm sure she knows our kiddos' names by now, too.

Anywhoo, back to outdoor dog.  While the fence is coated with ivy, there are some patches where you can see through to each yard.  This meant that our dogs would come face to face with Outdoor Dog (officially his name now) a few times a day and massive barking would ensue.  In an attempt to fix this, I came up with this extremely attractive solution:

This is the biggest hole,

currently "fixed" with a trash can lid
and a panel from our composter.

Smaller holes,

patched with pieces of cardboard.

Eat your heart out, Martha Stewart.

What these shots don't show is how we're blocking off the vision line
between dogs on the north side of the house.
There, we're using the wheelbarrow.

Classy.

Okay, so with the official tour photos out of the way, a few of the odder things about the house.  Number one is that we have a demon hole in the kitchen.  For those of you who are going, "a demon hole?", please think of any horror movie you've ever seen that features hell spawn.  They always come from some sort of portal or opening in the earth, right?  Well, one of those is in the kitchen of our rental house.

The first time I looked in here,
I fully expected to see an eyeball
looking back at me from the other side.

Thankfully, the demon hole is located on the small interior wall between the kitchen and hallway, so it's unlikely anything will get in from outside.  Even so, when I see it, I'm tempted to put a piece of packing tape over it, just in case.  Even better is that, as you can see in these photos, the entire kitchen counter is old school ceramic tile which features actual, 20-year old grout.  It creeps Chris out so much - just gives him fits of squickiness, which I find hysterical.  I don't plan to lick the counter myself (at least, on a normal day), but he's purchased a few of those super thin flexible plastic cutting boards, and he just keeps moving them around the kitchen under his coffee maker or whatever.  He's not a germophobe by any means (he wouldn't have survived the Navy if that was the case), but this counter seriously freaks him out.

As I mentioned earlier, our landlord pretty much lets folks do what they want to the house as long as they don't burn it down, so this place has been wired and re-wired and re-re-wired about a million times, from what we can tell.  There are random cords sticking out of walls in every room, and only a few of them work.  Scroll back up to the pictures from the master bedroom, and you'll see our WiFi box sitting on my dresser, which is clearly the most obvious place for a router (it has lovely blue lights that glow softly at night - it's like sleeping inside a Karaoke Box).  If you think I'm kidding about the cord situation, see the following shots:

Exhibit A -
another cord in the master bedroom,
peeking out from under Chris' dresser.

We see you!

Exhibit B - 

cording coming out from under the carpet
in the spare bedroom.
Oh, and while we're looking at the cord situation here,
check this out:

This is the location of the ONE outlet in the entire bedroom.
Hence, dueling extension cords.
Mom, please be careful when you come to visit us in July.

Exhibit C -
on a random wall in the living room.
This one is super fun,
because if you try to push it back into the wall
(you can see the plug collar, right?),

it comes flying back out, all SPROING!

It's pretty awesome.

Oh, and don't even think of using this plug,

apparently.

It was like this when we moved in,
and we haven't touched it.

It probably calls the demons for the demon hole.

While the wiring inside is clearly bananas, outside it's even worse.  The front of the house just has wires tacked to every conceivable flat surface; it's a good thing our landlord plans to rent this house in perpetuity, because if she ever tried to sell it, any good home inspector would see the wires and immediately drop dead on the spot.

Another bit of weirdness is the garage.  When we signed our papers and moved in, our landlord said, "oh, if you want to park in the garage, that's fine, but the previous tenants worked on converting it into a study room.  Thus, if you want to use it as living space, that's fine too."  Upon investigation, it was found that yes, the garage was carpeted (you can see that in the garage shots above), and yes, it was drywalled, and it was even painted inside.  However, as far as it being a "study room," the half-finished wet bar and multimedia hookups quickly quashed this line of reasoning for us; this garage was being converted into a man-cave.  

We thought about the parking situation and decided that we could easily park both vehicles in the driveway if needed (it has plenty of space), but after investigating the situation a bit further, we realized that we wouldn't be the first car to park in there after its conversion:

These oil spots are not from my car.

All of these ridiculous things aside, we're enjoying the rental house, and it's serving our purpose for it extremely well, even if it does cost $800 more a month than our mortgage in Arizona on a house double the size.  Actually, for a more apples to apples comparison, it's $1600 a month MORE than the Casa Grande house, which had 300 more square feet.  Never change, California.

Later!

Amy