Parade of Homes, Part Two

In August 2002, we packed up all our belongings and moved from Provo, Utah to Berkeley, California. And what a terrible experience that move was. I won't go into details, but it included a kidney infection, a midnight run to the ER, and a one-day delay to our move. All this after our phone had been turned off. Nightmare. But we made it.

Two very different places, Provo and Berkeley. After some searching, during which we looked at a couple of horribly disgusting apartments, we found our new home. Our second apartment.

2234 McGee St., Apt. N, Berkeley, CA
1 bedroom, 1 bathroom
Square footage: much bigger than Verl's basement
Third floor
Parking: free (a bonus in Berkeley)
Rent: $1000/month (gasp!) with $1000 deposit required
Length of stay: August 2002 - August 2003
Laundry facilities on site!
Landlord: Bernard Mok, very nice and responsive. He would give us this magical chalk that made it so ants couldn't come in. Handy stuff.

Some highpoints:

• 15-minute walk from Berkeley campus. Also walking distance from the post office, the public library, a really delicious Indian restaurant, and one extremely expensive grocery store called Andronico's. Oh, and a bright-pink-painted thrift store called Out of the Closet.
  
• Coin-op washer and dryer in the basement of the apartment building.
• Patio with a view of the sunset.
• Nice landlord.
• When we moved out, we got our deposit back plus interest, as the local laws required.
  

Some lowpoints:

• $1000 a month for a 1 bedroom! Are you kidding me? And this was fairly reasonable considering how close we were to campus and how nice the neighborhood was.
• No A/C and bad window design. No one has air conditioning there. In June, however, when the temperature unexpectedly spiked into the 90s, it would have helped. But what was worse was the fact that the apartment had windows on only one side--the west-facing side. Afternoon heat with no cross breeze. Yuck.

I have almost no photos of the place of even of us inside it, but I do have these two, taken as we were cleaning it after we had moved out.


I don't have a lot to say about this home. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. A lot happened to us in the short year we lived there (including our first furniture purchase--a couch), but when I think back on my time in Berkeley, I don't immediately think of this apartment.

It was in this apartment that I heard my father's voice for the last time.

Stay tuned because the next installment is where the Parade of Homes starts to get really exciting. Oh, and go back and look at Parade of Homes, Part One again because it now includes photos that have recently entered the digital era.