A tale of two apartments

I woke up today and was shocked to see that everything blanketed in snow! It also snowed the first week I got here but it wasn't as much and it melted pretty quickly.

I also checked out an apartment on Tuesday called Nido that I have still been considering applying for but I wanted to check out at least one other one because it didn't seem smart to take the very first one that I found. It is a risk to wait even one hour after seeing an apartment that you like in Copenhagen because they get taken so quickly. The apartment that I saw on Tuesday is mainly aimed at students, it's right across the street from Copenhagen University. It was a really tiny studio, like under 29 square meters, but with a normal sized bathroom that has the shower separate to the toilet - you'll understand what that means if you keep reading! It is located in a great location in the neighborhood of Islands Brygge, about 3 minutes walk to the Metro station and many shops, plus close to 2 of my coworkers apartments so I would know some people in the area already. It also has all kinds of amenities as part of the building like a cinema room, a bunch of study rooms, a gym, a yoga room and a rooftop deck among other things. 

Notably, they were also asking for only 1 month rent as a deposit. Every other place that I have encountered or read about ask for 3 months rent as a deposit, and from various reddit posts, facebook group stories, and general word of mouth, it's a known thing that a tenant has essentially no hope of getting any of their deposit back upon moving out. Even if the apartment is only inhabited by the most careful renter, walking, nay floating above the floors and never touching the surfaces, what happens is that the landlord will do a move out inspection, and find the tiniest scratch in the wooden floor, and a mark on the wall and insist that the floors need to be re-sanded and refinished, and the walls need to be professionally painted, and there goes the whole deposit to pay for that, and often even more is requested and then it's up to the tenant to find a lawyer or take the landlord through some kind of mediation. So essentially once you pay the deposit its best to kiss that money goodbye. When a month's rent can be between 8000 - 12000 kr a month, that times 3 can be R75000 or more. So miraculously the fact that this company is only asking for 1 month rent is a huge point in its favour.

Getting back to today, I had an apartment viewing in Valby at 11am so there was just enough time to get to the office and do a little bit of work and plot my route of how I would be getting to this apartment showing (using Google Maps and also Rejseplanen). Unlike the Nido apartment, this one required me to take the metro line almost all the way from one end to the other, then get off and catch a bus and ride that for about 20 minutes. Door to door from my office it would be about 50 minutes in the best case scenario. 

To my surprise and amazement all the grey clouds from just an hour before had cleared leaving a perfectly blue sky and giving me a view of the sun for the first time in nearly 2 weeks!

My first viewing of direct sunlight in 2 weeks!

I made it outside the apartment at 10:55, just 5 minutes early. This neighborhood looked much more suburban than any other part of Copenhagen that I've seen, although all I've really seen of Copenhagen is the area that the Sankt Annæ hotel is in (Nyhavn/Frederiksstaden) and the area where the office and my current Cabinn hotel are (Ørestad), and both are mainly populated with 10 story plus buildings.

I called the agent who buzzed me in and I walked up the 3 flights of stairs to get to the apartment (yet more points awarded to Nido for having an elevator). The absurdly good looking man asked me to take off my shoes as they had just redone the floors and told me about the apartment as I mused over how good looking Scandinavians are. The one big deal that he warned me about the apartment (also mentioned in the listing) is that the apartment has no washing machine or dryer, and neither does the building overall. Essentially the plan is that once you have used up all your clean clothes, you load everything up into a suitcase and take a field trip across town to the nearest laundromat which is about 4km away. Alternatively, he told me that the previous tenant allegedly had installed a washing machine installed although where and how they accomplished that was totally beyond either of us as there were no water and drainage points to be found. He said that if I wanted to, as long as I arranged and paid to have the machine installed, and then removed once I moved out, I was welcome to. Who knows how much such a feat would cost in Copenhagen but suffice to say it would not be cheap.

The apartment was a nice size, making the Nido apartment look positively tiny by comparison. It had a separate kitchen equipped with a gas stove, a full sized fridge and many cupboards. It also had a separate large-ish living room and separate bedroom. In Johannesburg this would be called a 1 bedroom apartment but in Denmark they don't tell you what to do with each room so they just call it a 2 room apartment. However it did have the usual Copenhagen bathroom where the shower is basically directly above the toilet.The apartment also had very large windows (even in the kitchen which I was told is not the norm) and as you can see from the photo gallery it was the perfect day to demonstrate just how much natural light they let in. I took a video walkthrough of the apartment. The agent told me that there were a lot of other people that wanted to view it so whether or not I wanted to take it, I should let him know so he could plan accordingly. Since I was coming via Charlies Roof (the agency that I used to find this and the Nido listing from) I would be first choice in line to take if I wanted it. I felt like a VIP for having discovered this Charlies Roof (thanks Reddit!) and I had a big decision to make! He then sent me on my way.

I caught the bus and contemplated making a journey of this size every day. Actually it would probably longer since I would be doing it in peak traffic hours every day. However, this is the tradeoff one has to make when choosing an apartment in Copenhagen. Unless one wants to pay more than 16000 kr per month, in which case one can have the best of all worlds, one needs to choose between either a tiny, newly built, modern fixtured apartment, or older, less polished, more spacious apartment.

By the time I had arrived back at the office it was time for lunch and to visit the iPad Juice tap. I talked it over with some of my coworkers (Martin and Dina) over lunch but I had basically made up my mind that I would be okay with the smaller apartment because of the far better location. I filled out the application form for Nido and hopefully everything gets approved and it can become my new home! Steven would surely love having a babysitter in walking distance of his home and perhaps living amongst mainly students will make me feel young and hip again!