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Need some moving advice, may finally be Seattle-bound
Artereis
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Registered User regular
I'm hoping that some of you may have been in my shoes and might have some advice for me on a couple of points.
My wife and I have been talking about moving to the Seattle area for a few years now. Things have finally aligned that make it so it might actually be possible. My current job affords me the ability to work remotely, so we'll have at least one fixed income coming into the area. We currently live in northern Virginia, so it'll be quite a long haul. I saw people in another thread talking about the benefits of the PODS or Uhaul service, but most people were talking about moving smaller apartments. We currently rent a 3 bedroom townhouse, though one bedroom is an office and the other is mostly empty. Would you still consider going this way? I'd still want to consider hiring a service to pack some of our more expensive items. For example, we have a 55" plasma that we couldn't keep the box for due to size.
On the job front, it's up in the air on whether or not my wife would be employed before we arrived. Her current department does have some remote employees, and they like her work, but we don't yet know what their take would be when she discusses our plans. We're planning on only having my salary to work with, which will have some impact on our renting situation. If it turns out that a new job ends up being downtown, are there better places to be living to make the commute easier? Would living north of Seattle versus in the Bellevue area be better for her? I expect the commute to suck either way, but does it get better if you're not taking 520 or 90 into town? Most of our research has been anywhere from Mill Creek down to Renton. We haven't spent much time looking at the Shoreline/Northgate area. Are there areas we'd want to avoid?
We intend to engage with a realtor to help with the apartment/house hunt. Does anyone have any recommendations? A lot of the listings that we've looked at seem to be fairly pet friendly, which is good because we have two cats.
My wife and I have been talking about moving to the Seattle area for a few years now. Things have finally aligned that make it so it might actually be possible. My current job affords me the ability to work remotely, so we'll have at least one fixed income coming into the area. We currently live in northern Virginia, so it'll be quite a long haul. I saw people in another thread talking about the benefits of the PODS or Uhaul service, but most people were talking about moving smaller apartments. We currently rent a 3 bedroom townhouse, though one bedroom is an office and the other is mostly empty. Would you still consider going this way? I'd still want to consider hiring a service to pack some of our more expensive items. For example, we have a 55" plasma that we couldn't keep the box for due to size.
On the job front, it's up in the air on whether or not my wife would be employed before we arrived. Her current department does have some remote employees, and they like her work, but we don't yet know what their take would be when she discusses our plans. We're planning on only having my salary to work with, which will have some impact on our renting situation. If it turns out that a new job ends up being downtown, are there better places to be living to make the commute easier? Would living north of Seattle versus in the Bellevue area be better for her? I expect the commute to suck either way, but does it get better if you're not taking 520 or 90 into town? Most of our research has been anywhere from Mill Creek down to Renton. We haven't spent much time looking at the Shoreline/Northgate area. Are there areas we'd want to avoid?
We intend to engage with a realtor to help with the apartment/house hunt. Does anyone have any recommendations? A lot of the listings that we've looked at seem to be fairly pet friendly, which is good because we have two cats.
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Source: Currently buying in Mill Creek. Hi there potential neighbour!
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Is commuting by car pretty much awful anywhere, or only if you're going into the city? She's been primarily looking for work outside of Seattle proper. We're no strangers to long commutes and traffic. It would be nice to avoid it to some degree if possible, though.
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First off--commuting via freeway is going to suck from any direction, but it's none worse than East/West. 90 and 520 get very crowded (and 520 is a toll bridge, to boot), and there's no option for escape. By contrast, I-5 has the express lanes to help alleviate traffic, and if worst comes to worst you can always bail and hit up 99, or even take surface streets.
My usual recommendation is to just move to the city itself, since our rents are reasonable and our public transit is good. However, times have changed... rents have skyrocketed in Capitol Hill and South Lake Union, in anticipation of Amazon's new, compound-sized headquarters, and although I'm sure that other neighborhoods have been affected as well, it's getting more difficult to find reasonable accommodation. It's not impossible, of course, and actual houses tend to be scarce inside the city proper.
And the thing about transit... unfortunately, the county voters decided not to pass the latest roads & transit plan, so we're looking at service reduction and route deletion in September. There's a backup plan in the works to try and get Metro its funding, but it's still up in the air and the deadline is looming. Right now, the bus system is plenty reliable for commuting, and indeed, the main commuter runs might not be affected too much, but we won't know for sure until September.
One fine thing is Car2Go. We've had Zipcar up here for years, but Car2Go just hit the scene last year, and it's groovy. If you're puzting around the heart of the city, the cars are plentiful, and being able to just park it without finding a designated spot is amazing. For those moments when the bus fails me, I can grab a car and get to where I'm going to roughly 20% of the cost of a cab.
Eh, I could ramble all day, so if you have any specific questions, shoot.
Just a quick search says that for your budget, you are looking at a 2 bed 900 sqft apartment in the city, 2 bed 1200 sqft in Ballard, Fremont, Green Lake and such, or a 3 to 4 bed 2200+sqft house in Mill Creek.
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It's a dramatic improvement on your quality of life. That extra time, every day, not spent in traffic makes your whole day a lot more relaxing. And being only a few miles from downtown activities, that really helps on the weekends. It's worth a lot, enough to easily justify a smaller, older apartment or house.
One of the biggest reasons we're making this move (aside from just liking the area in genera) is that real estate is much, much more affordable than where we are in Virginia, and we're at the point where we're thinking about kids. We intend for the renting situation to be temporary, if possible only for the first year in the area.
Ideally, we won't need to put any of our stuff into storage. We'd like the only rent we're paying to be for housing, if possible. Does anyone have any areas they'd stay away from?
In my experience there's benefits to going either way. Out of the city is great if most of the stuff you like to do is outdoorsy or at your own place. Having friends over, barbequing, going on hikes, skiing, playing video games, these are all things that will be basically the same to vastly better living outside the city. Mostly because you wont have to deal with as much nightmare traffic and your home will be bigger and nicer. Plus you'll still be close enough to take day trips to seattle proper to go to events and just tool around the city.
Living in the city allows you to do more city things. You don't have to think about going into seattle proper as a day trip anymore, you can hop on a bus and be almost anywhere in 20ish minutes. This allows you to go to the best restaurants/bars/concerts/cool stores whenever you feel like it. Plus it's usually way easier to find new friends and get together with them when you can walk out your door and be at somewhere fun to hang out in under 20 minutes. While it's nicer having friends over at your huge suburbs house, it's easier to get together with friends when you all live in a densely packed area and can be at a communal place with almost no effort.
I could go on, but basically you get the drift. You really have to think about what kinds of things you like to do, and how often you do them. Then once you decide inside or outside the city we can get more specific in terms of the best locations.
Oh, I've meant to add this, but are HOAs pretty common out there? How restrictive do they tend to be?
The place I am buying has one. Cost is minimal, and it's basically to make sure people don't let their place go to shit. The expensive ones are in the apartment buildings in the city. One of them cost almost as much as the mortgage payment.
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If at all possible live near where you work
If not possible live on the same side of Lake Washington as where you work
If not possible I'll pray for you
If you end up somewhat outside of the urban center (North/South of Lake Washington and away from the Bellevue-Redmond-Seattle triangle) commutes by car aren't all that bad which is good because the public transit options are a bit more limited and soon to be worse.
Speaking of, is it pretty easy to get FIOS around there? I'd like to avoid Comcast if possible.
Highly dependent on where you live, down to the neighborhood even.
I've lived with my family in Renton for going on ten years now, and have seen a fair bit of Kent and Tukwila from temping so feel free to ask me about those areas. In a nutshell, I can say Renton is trying for the small town appeal while the border areas and high points attempt to mimic Bellevue.
Most of the cultural stuff will happen in Seattle and you'll have to drive out for that, but once your plans and lifestyle crystallize into children, you'll be sitting on a house and property ready for kids.
There's also a dog park that's fairly popular with a river nearby.
Also, if 5 ends up being the closest route into the city for us, is there any real difference on the weekends if you're coming in from the north versus the south for a day in the city? She's debating on whether it would be beneficial to be a little closer to SeaTac if they want her to fly into corporate with any regularity. The only real experience I have with 5 is coming in mid-day Thursday for PAX.
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So if you don't care about being close to the city, Renton, Kent, and Auburn are good options because the housing prices are significantly lower, you can get to and from the airport pretty fast, and you'll be within 20-30 miles of both Bellevue and Seattle.
Comcast will service most areas, right now their top tier speed is 50/10 for around$85 a month. I have this service and it is ok for the most part. Although the last few months have seen some strange network issues that keep cropping up. Extremely slow download speeds but uploads are fine as well as packet loss. These have tended to get cleared up over night or the next day but have happened to me about 6 times now in the last 2 months.
Then there are the two telcos Century Link and Frontier. They offer mostly DSL services Century Link has fiber to the node service in some areas and I think they go up to at least 20mbps. Frontier bought Verizon's FiOS operations in the west but there is not much of that here and from what I understand they are not building that out anymore. Otherwise Frontier has standard DSL services as well.
There are a few Clecs like Click in Tacoma, Cascade Link in the Seattle area as well as Wave Cable and a few others.
However there is one other that is not much talked about called the Highlands Fiber network it is a community owned fiber network in an area called the Issaquah Highlands. Its about 20 minutes away from Seattle on the outer East side of Lake Washington. They do 10/10 and 100/20 for under $60 a month there is also a pricier Gig service available in some areas.
I think that mostly covers it for internet services.
I don't think we really do realtors for rental here. I mean I'm sure you could find someone but it's not very common. I've never know anyone who wasn't making $texas to do it. It's all hotpads, padmapper, craigslist, and legwork.
Maybe I'm out of touch, if other seattle people want to check in.
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
The lease is up, and I am moving tomorrow to rent a condo in South Park. Much closer to the city than I was but still well off the beaten path.
I've been seeing a woman in Beacon Hill, and I gotta say, that seems like a very good area! Closer to the buses and transit than I am, but not the heart of the city where having a car may hinder you some.
Seattle in general doesn't have a lot of crime, certainly not what I thought of, and home internet access seems pretty solid everywhere I've looked.
Also, hurry up and get here! I don't want to be the only new person.
The only snag in our plans is that my wife ended up being scouted, so we might be moving to Santa Monica now. We have some pretty intense sticker shock looking at those rental prices. Hopefully we'll know in a week or so whether or not we can make that place affordable.
Edit - Also, there were Taco Time restaurants everywhere. I've never heard of this chain before.