The Hunt For The New Apartment
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I remember arriving in Dublin and having 30 days to find an apartment to live in. It was October 2008, the renting market was at its peak – meaning the prices were insane and it was common to stand in line to see a place, praying that someone before you won’t snatch it up, even though it may be a bit above your price range. I ended up arriving to the apartment that would end up being my home for a year at the same time as a whole bunch of other people, literally pushing my way to the woman who was showing the place and yelling “I’m taking it!” before anyone else got a chance to open their mouth. I signed the contract, paid the deposit and first month’s rent and had my first home outside Croatia full 2 weeks before my deadline. Compared to the most recent apartment hunt (the word “search” is simply way too mild to even begin to describe the experience), my first Dublin search seems to have been a breeze.
I remember everyone bitching about how expensive it is to live in Dublin. It really is and it was especially pricey in 2008 when rents were even higher than in London. They have gone down somewhat since, but Dublin still remains an expensive city to live in.
Tel Aviv is a whole different story and not necessarily in a good way. The rents here are roughly on the level of Dublin prices. However, I think I can safely say that I am not in Kansas anymore…
In short, some of the key differences are the following:
In Dublin renting is regulated. In Tel Aviv the renting market resembles, if anything, the wild west. Dublin apartments, or at least those I was considering, were reasonably sized. In Tel Aviv, you’re never sure what to expect from the apartment you’re going to see, i.e. you can’t be sure if the owner kept the apartment at it’s original size or got greedy and decided to split a perfectly normal-sized apartment into 2-3 shoe boxes that he just calls apartments, with potentially some really weird layouts. In Dublin, most apartments are renovated (before anyone objects, I didn’t say tastefully, just renovated). In Tel Aviv, most people renting out apartments seem to think “renovation” is a dirty word. In Dublin most apartments come fully furnished. In Tel Aviv they range from partially furnished (if you’re lucky), completely bare, to you-wish-they-were-completely-bare (if you’re unlucky).
In the 2-month hunt, we’ve seen quite a few places but a couple of them really stood out:
Exhibit 1
An apartment that literally hasn’t been touched since the 60s. It was so disgusting I was afraid to even brush against anything there. Some of my favorite features of this “jewel” were:
- Small guest room with no windows but with a sink. WTF???
- Bathroom so tiny that it fit half a bathtub, one of those small top-loading washing machines and a sink, leaving enough room for one person to stand in there.
- Huge 60s kitchen with tons of storage but surprisingly no oven or stove or room to put it in.
- One of the biggest cockroaches I’ve seen in my life.
Charming, no? The best thing was that the owner was asking the price that we’d consider paying for a newly renovated place in the same location.
Exhibit 2
Another “favorite” was the apartment that was advertised as 60 m2 with 2 bedrooms and a spacious living room. There was nothing spacious about the living room, and the apartment was 50 m2 at most, but it did have some interesting features, such as:
- Old and rusty bars on all the windows in true prison-style (yes, it was 1st floor, but still).
- Two tiny bedrooms with even tinier windows that I’m not sure how someone would even fit the smallest double bed in there let alone a closet.
- Kitchen that on first glance doesn’t have a window, but on the second one you realize it does but that it opens to a service room/pantry which has a window that actually opens to outside. Again, WTF???
After seeing these two gems in just two days, I vetoed seeing any more apartments that had no pictures in ads because these “Exhibits” just proved my old theory that if pictures aren’t there, it’s for a reason.
Any way, after getting more and more frustrated and extending our current lease for an extra month, we finally managed to find our new place which (so far) had no nasty surprises, was fully renovated 5 years ago (and will be freshly painted before we move in), is in the same neighborhood, comes partially furnished and most importantly with a normal-sized kitchen :).
My kitchen
It still managed to have one feature I’ve never seen before: the air conditioner unit in the bedroom is in the closet! However, as it doesn’t even come into the top 10 of weird things I’ve seen, I’m sure we’ll manage…