Dan and Sarah Look for Apartments

Sarah and Dan spent the next week looking online exhaustively at places for Dan to live in Chicago. Due to the location of Dan’s new job and their budget, housing rentals were quickly eliminated from the equation. Many of the ideal locations close to Dan’s work were occupied, so the couple had to expand their search to apartment buildings in different parts of the city. After a few days, they booked several appointments to view different units in person.

Sarah took a few days off work and had her parents stay with the kids so she could accompany Dan on his hunt for an apartment. They drove up to Chicago on Friday with the plan to spend the weekend making their appointments and looking for other rental opportunities.

Over the course of the weekend, both Dan and Sarah began to become dismayed at the rental prospects in the city. Their short list of apartments grew increasingly shorter with each appointment.

The first apartment they visited would have had Dan sharing a unit with an older gentleman who was clearly a hoarder. The common area was used as a storage space for the packaging and garbage that this man had accumulated over the years. Even the room that would have been Dan’s was filled with a mountain of items that would need to be relocated before anything else could be moved in.

While the rest of the appointments were attractively advertised online, they were anything but in person. Either the state of the apartment was in disrepair or the quality of the roommate did not meet Dan’s expectations. After checking out all of the rentals on their list, Dan and Sarah had met several high-functioning **** users as well as some that were not so high functioning. They encountered a few cat ladies and even a man that presented Dan with a roommate agreement that he wanted to be signed which outlined how Dan was to conduct himself while in the apartment. The agreement tried to regulate when Dan would be allowed to use their shared Internet and for what purposes. It even went as far as requesting that Dan book when Sarah was to visit ahead of time to obtain the roommate’s approval.

The only appointment that had been acceptable to Dan would see him rooming with a female college senior. Sarah quickly shot down that option.

After visiting every apartment on their list, the couple returned to their hotel room dismayed.

With his eyes closed, Dan slowly massaged his temples while sitting on the edge of the bed. “I don’t think I’m going to have a place to stay before I start work next week.”

“We’ll find something,” Sarah said and she moved behind her husband and wrapped her arms around his chest. “This city is huge, and there has to be somewhere that isn’t completely terrible.” She planted a reassuring kiss on Dan’s shoulder, letting her head rest there.

Dan stopped massaging his temples and brought his hand up to slowly stroke Sarah’s hair. “I just can’t believe every apartment we checked out was a bust.” He shook his head. “We had a list of promising spots, a few were even close to work and none of them panned out.”

Moving from her place behind Dan, Sarah got off the bed and stood in front of her husband with her hands on her hips. “We’re not gonna let this get us down. There is a perfect spot for you....for us, here in Chicago. We just need to find it.” She shot Dan a genuinely warm smile that reminded him just how much he loved her. Even though she was strikingly beautiful, her caring and compassionate personality was what he loved most.

The smile quickly faded from Sarah’s face only to be replaced with a look of determination as she marched across the room to her purse. She wasn’t about to let her husband be homeless in a new city, and she certainly wasn’t going to let them sit around and mope in their hotel room. As a hospital administrator, Sarah was used to solving problems all day long. Whether the hospital was running low on a certain item or had a staffing issue, Sarah was always able to find a solution.

She quickly unzipped her purse and reached in, searching for her smartphone. While making her way back over to the bed, she began navigating the internet looking for newly posted rentals in the area. Dan watched her as she crossed in front of him, Sarah not taking her eyes off the phone as she moved onto the bed in a sitting position against the headboard. He admired her determination and quickly located his cell phone to follow suit.

After a half hour of unsuccessfully searching for a new listing that would be different from their other appointments, Sarah was almost ready to call it quits. I can’t give up. We need to find a place for Dan to live. What other websites should I check?

The answer quickly dawned on her. Before this pivotal decision, their searches were restricted to rental listing sites for Chicago and the websites of individual apartment complexes. Sarah then remembered the name of a website she had never visited, but had heard about on the news and from her co-workers at the hospital.

It was a website that she would eventually wish she had never remembered.

She quickly typed ‘craigslist.com’ into her phone’s browser and navigated to the page for Chicago rentals. Scrolling through the listings, Sarah quickly realized that there were a ton of apartments available for rent that she had never even stumbled across in her past searches. Maybe this is it!

A recent listing near the top of the page caught her eye.

“Clean spacious two bedroom, quiet roommate”

She clicked the link and was brought to a page that had several pictures with a current time stamp on them. The pictures showed off a reasonably clean apartment that appeared to have a good amount of space. The bathroom, common area, kitchen and Dan’s prospective bedroom were all showcased and appeared much better kept than what the couple had already experienced throughout the weekend.

Staring intently at the screen, Sarah read over the description of the unit. Location, check. Price, check. Male roommate, check!

Before asking her husband his thoughts, she quickly sent the poster an email stating her interest and desire to see the unit in person. After the weekend they’d had, she wasn’t about to let this apartment go to someone else.

After clicking the send button, Sarah excitedly looked over at her husband. “I think I found you a place!”