Apartment Hunting Blog - rue Roqulaine

This was a very nice apartment, on the 3rd floor, about 2 blocks away from our current place. It was another apartment where the owner was living there previously and had decided to rent it out. In this case, he was moving in with someone else and so this apartment was the one they were renting. He was leaving all of his furniture and things. One difference here was that he would keep all of the utilities in his name and just add the amount that we owed onto the rent bill each month. The other furnished apartments that were not part of Sebastien's group of apartments required us to hook up the utilities in our name (and pay the amount owed, while Sebastien's normally included utilities already in the price and it never changed regardless of how little or how much we used). We didn't have a strong preference one way or the other, but it was just something to note in our little spreadsheet (yea, we continue to have spreadsheets for everything!) that we were keeping track of each apartment with pros, cons, prices, etc.

Nice living room and dining room combination, although as you can see, a bit small. Small dining room table with 4 chairs although it would have been tight with 4 people on it. It had a very large window and a balcony setup with a table and 2 chairs, which overlooked the street.

A galley-style kitchen with sink, dishwasher, oven and 3-burner electric cooktop on one side and a decent sized refrigerator on the other with lots of counter space. No microwave, but we could either guy one (they are fairly inexpensive) or really do without one. We don't use the one we have in this apartment all that often.

At the end of the galley was a door, which opened into a "closet" that had the small (like the 12-18 inch wide ones) machine although it was a combination washer/dryer. I hadn't seen a washer/dryer combination that small, but sure enough ... you can find them. The other side were shelves, although as you can see, they were pretty, well, bad. Not sure what I would feel comfortable putting on those shelves other than cleaning products.

The guest bedroom is, again, pretty small. They had a small desk there and this bed, which converts to a double bed. Good use of space, this has the drawers underneath.

The master had a double-bed, plenty of built-ins, and a little chair under a window. The ensuite had the biggest shower we had seen to date in France! The toilet (only one) was separate but this was another case where guests would have to walk through our bedroom to shower. Not sure which is worse .. that case or where we have to walk out of our bedroom and through the living room or kitchen to get to the shower in the middle of the apartment. Hmmm... probably this is better since we won't have guests every day!

Parking, well ... that was interesting. I had thought the ad indicated parking but maybe it was "possibility" of parking. There was parking in the courtyard, but we could only park there evenings and weekends, since the parking during business hours was reserved for the business that was on the ground floor. Well, that may work great for someone who drives to work five days a week, but for us, not so much. We did find 5 or 6 available parking places for rent in various other buildings within a 2-block radius. While not ideal, it was doable and not much worse than some anything else we had seen, including Agathoise.