Our First Weekend in Salt Lake: Apartment Hunt Edition
I’m sorry that this post is a bit overdue, but honesty I’ve just been too stressed and depressed to blog. My biggest impression of Salt Lake after being here for the weekend is that I hate it and I want to go home. However, that’s not really giving it a fair shake, so we’ll have to reassess as time goes on. The mountains are cool, but the air quality is so bad from the smoke carrying over from California wildfires that you can’t see too much. There are also a ton of dentists/orthodontists/oral surgeons in this area. Practically every single shopping center has some sort of dental practice. I don’t what’s up with people in Utah and their teeth, but geez, I’ve never seen so many dentists in one place. Sometimes you’ll even get a hybrid office building where half is dental surgery and half is plastic surgery. There’s a lot of that going on here too. I’ve been going to the same dentist since I was seven, and I had really been holding onto that prior to leaving, so it’s kind of ironic that I now live in an area overrun with dentists.
The area where we stayed this weekend is called Sugar House. It has a big park, restaurants, grocery stores, and a lot of apartments and neighborhoods with older, small houses all squished together. We’ve been staying in one of those houses. It smells like cat pee, but it’s quaint I suppose. It has a nice backyard, which is the thumbnail photo for this post. It’s kind of hard to see in the photo at the end, but there are grapes growing in the backyard too. The neighborhood is nice in that you can walk to pretty much everything, including the TRAX, which is this all-electric, above ground rail system that runs through the city. Ian could get to work near the airport on the TRAX if we lived here and he wanted to. We haven’t ridden it yet, but it seems fine, at least compared to the metro in DC.
We’ve been going on so many apartment tours that they’ve all kind of blend together at this point, but I’ll try to pull out the highlights. In Sugar House, there are a lot of new apartment complexes. We only toured two, both a little further away from the main strip because all of the places closest to the action are A) too expensive and B) at full occupancy. We did apply to one place we really liked that’s one block further away from the main drag than our Air B&B. They have rental apartments and townhouses, and we’re hoping for the townhouse. Had we stayed in Maryland, we would have tried to rent a townhouse anyway, so it felt like a good option.
We also toured a bunch of places in suburbs outside of Salt Lake City proper, the most notable of which is called Herriman. Herriman is about a 30 minute drive Southwest of Salt Lake City. It’s has a ton of new residential properties, and even more being built. It definitely seems like a place where people live but don’t work, but the apartments and houses were all really nice. This one complex we visited was built in 2019, had over 500 units, a convenience store, a spa, two pools, three hot tubs, an indoor golf simulator, indoor basketball court, and ran on 85% solar power. However, the staff in the leasing office were kind of rude and pretentious, and the whole atmosphere didn’t feel quite right. Ian said is felt like a cult. The price was right, but we opted not to apply. We did get some delicious Hawaiian food for lunch at this little restaurant called The Salty Pineapple. They only have the one location in Herriman and a food truck. Apparently they won some food truck competition on TV. I’d never heard of the show, but it had a picture of Andrew Zimmern (the guy from Bizarre Foods) on it, so I guess it was legit. There’s a Hawaiian restaurant in pretty much every town here, which is both interesting and delicious.
Once we decided that Herriman was too residential and was bound to be a traffic nightmare, we switched gears back to Sugar House. We ultimately ended up applying for two places, the rental townhouse mentioned earlier in the post, and a teeny house in the neighborhood being rented out independently by the owner. She seems super nice, but the house is so small. We could make it work, but it would be an adjustment. We’ll see what we get approved for!
Okay, wow, this is already really long, so I will put some fun nature/hiking photos in a different post.
