House Hunting in Detroit

So this weekend we made our first big trip to Detroit. This was my second time in the city of Detroit, the first being for the interview for the new job. This was Sherry’s first time.

Our mission was simple: find a house. In one day. No pressure! Just one day to find the place we’re going to be spending the next year in.

It’s not like we came in knowing nothing about the town. Actually, it’s pretty easy to get fairly well up to speed on these things due to the miracle of the Internet. Craigslist gives you dozens of rentals. You can use Google Maps will not only show you where in town the place is, but that street view thing will let you look at the place and your neighbors. Another Google search can tell you about the various neighborhoods and suburbs of that worn-out metropolis. And we had a ton of suggestions.

We settled on looking at places in Royal Oak and Grosse Pointes. (For those of you in St. Louis, Royal Oak is like Maplewood only slightly more upscale and with a better downtown. Grosse Pointe is a combination of Ladue and St. Louis Hills, depending on how nice your street is. If you’re from Dallas, I can’t help you. There’s nothing remotely like either of these places there.)

The company kindly provided us with an agent named Hans who specializes in rental places. He managed to take us to nine places in about three hours.

Royal Oak ended up being a complete bust. All the rental houses had that shabbiness that you get from houses that change tenants every year or so. Good houses get snatched up quickly and by the time we visited, the town had been pretty well picked over.

However, in Grosse Pointe we found two places we really liked. One of them was a house in Grosse Pointe Woods owned by another agent whom Hans knew, wasn’t even on the market yet. Hans had talked to the guy, who agreed to let us look at the place.

The place was awesome, so sometime around 2 in the afternoon, we called Hans back and asked him to get in touch. Hans worked his magic and the guy agreed to let us rent the place.

In comparison to our current place, this house is bigger, nicer, on a much quieter street in a much nicer neighborhood. I think we lucked out getting this place. This street was more St. Louis Hills than Ladue, so I don’t think we’ll come across like total frauds living in this place, either. Although I’m still not convinced I’m a Grosse Pointe person, but living is easy in the Pointes, and I’m sure I’ll be get past any reservations I might have.

Of course, we still haven’t gotten anything in writing, but hopefully that won’t be a problem. We found another place in Grosse Pointe Farms (home of Meg White) which we also liked, but it was a bit smaller, and didn’t have some bonus features of the one we settled on like the fenced in yard. But hopefully that won’t be an issue.

I had more thoughts about the trip, but I hear Gus getting fussy. Maybe tomorrow.