The Land of a Different Horse

When the clock rolls around to about 2:30 PM Mountain Time, I will have been a resident of the city of Denver, CO for one whole week. My journey here was not terribly difficult but not especially easy either. A brief compromise of my immune system saw to that. As you may recall from a previous post, the moving option I chose to go with was the "stuffing my car with as many boxes as bags as possible and then driving 1100 miles in two days" strategy.

And that's precisely what I did. During the afternoon and evening of Thursday, August 30th, I packed my 4-Door Honda Accord as full as I could without creating new blindspots for myself. My plan was to drive 10 hours to Salina, Kansas, where I had already made a hotel reservation through Priceline.com, and put another 6.5 hours of travels behind me the next day. Once I set this plan in motion, I was bound to it. To my knowledge, Priceline reservations cannot be canceled without forfeiting the hotel fee (which is paid up front) and the woman who runs my new apartment building had a difficult time lining up someone to meet and check me in once I arrived in Denver since I was coming into town during a holiday weekend.

This fixedness proved daunting when, just 12 hours before I was set to depart from Indianapolis, my gastro-intestinal candle started burning at both end...if you catch my drift. I felt far less than stellar but I know I would have tremendous difficulties putting together a new travel plan if I missed the window I'd built for myself. So the morning of August 31st, Susan was kind enough to buy me some Gatorade and a two liter of Sprite and I lived on those fluids and a sleeve a Saltines for the duration of my trip to Salina. Soon thereafter my innards had righted themselves and, by the time I went to sleep in my Denver apartment for the first time, my belly was full with a Subway footlong.

My present apartment is apart of building owned and operated by the Iliff School of Theology. As such, I had mentally prepared myself to find a one-bedroom apartment very much like the ones I had seen in Candler's Turner Village. That comparison won't do much for those of you unfamiliar with the community I lived in during my first year in Atlanta, but it should be an effective image for those of you who know it. (Or "knew" it I should say. I've been told that Emory is tearing the place down.)

What I actually encountered was a considerable improvement on my expectations. My bedroom is bigger than the ones at TV my bathroom is a couple of shades nicer (though the shower head is equally pathetic) and I actually have a little hall way separating my bedroom and bathroom from the rest of the apartment. There's also a door where you can close the back half off from the noise of the front half should you have the cause and desire to do so. The kitchen area is larger than the one in two-bedroom TV apartment I occupied, and there's even a small dining area adjacent to it so I don't have to put a dining table in the living room. Speaking of the living room, it's not luxuriously large but it is amply sized for a one-bedroom apartment. In short I'm pleased with the place. I'm paying the most I ever have for rent ($620/month) but it's not much more than I was paying for my share of rent and utilities during my second year in Atlanta and I'm getting a lot of apartment for my dollar.

Another major component of my moving plan was that I would be buying all new furniture once I showed up. The cheapest moving truck/service option my research uncovered would still have cost me around $1150, and the only pieces of furniture I would have brought with me were a queen size bed, a dresser, a cheap bookcase, a few media racks, and an aging La-Z-boy. My gas costs would also have been higher because I would have been paying to fuel a much larger vehicle with my own car in tow.

Well, I was thrilled to find a number of major pieces of furniture already present in an apartment I was informed would be entirely unfurnished. The bedroom came with a full size bed, a dresser and a small bookcase. The dining area has a small, square table complete with three chairs, while the living room came equipped with a couple of lamps and a decent recliner. There was already a curtain in place in the shower, and I found a microwave and coffee maker in the kitchen. I am planning keep nearly all these items around, thus my pleasant suprise has saved me at least $700-$800 of the money I had been planning to spend on new stuff.

My full-time job once I officially occupied the place was to buy the furniture, appliances, and other goods I still needed to purchase and find a proper place to put everything. Over the course of 5 days, I made three trips to Target, three to Bed, Bath & Beyond, one to Bestbuy, one to Wal-Mart, one to a regional grocery chain (Safeway), and one fruitless trip to Big!Lots. Just over $1000 later, I have:

*a fairly plush reading chair complete with Ottoman
*a glass-top computer desk
*a TV stand
*four end tables (two of which are serving as speaker stands)
*another cheap bookcase
*a four-piece lamp set
*three media racks (one will remain unbuilt until I bring the rest of my Video/DVD collection to Denver after Christmas break)
*a high-quality toaster, and
*a George Foreman grill. It's a Super Champ.

Of course there have been other domestic expense like food, trash cans, an ironing board, and the extra comfy mattress pad and pillows I got for my otherwise stiff bed. All in all, I've taken advantage of many a Labor Day and Back to School Sale and purchased some quality furniture cheaply (e.g. getting a hundred dollar desk for fifty bucks). And out of all the money I've spent this past week, I would have had to spend at least $450 of that even if I had used a moving truck or service. The only three thing left on my "To Buy" list are a desk chair, a coffee table, and- what will be the biggest single expense of all -a loveseat or sofa. All of which are also items I would have needed to get even if I had rented a truck. At the end of the day, it looks as though I saved myself $700 in rental and gas costs by following my chosen plan of action. That'll cover an extra month's rent and cell phone bill with some mad money left over.

Well, I figure that's all the information you ever cared to know about my move, my apartment, and my settling process. I'll post another blog entry soon about how orientation went yesterday and the initial impressions I have about what life will be like as a Ph.D. student.