shelleycat and i went by Costco, Office Max and Best Buy to check out scanners. After taking notes on the various models and prices it's now pretty obvious why Consumer Reports doesn't have a standalone scanner section. You can get a scanner that just scans for $70-80, and you can get a printer that just prints for $70-80. Or you could get a combo printer/scanner for... $70-80 :)After getting home i checked the Consumer Reports rankings vs. the models and prices i'd taken notes on. It looks like the best options are the HP OfficeJet 6500 for $100, which Consumer Reports rated at 64 for a price point of $140 and gave it their "best buy" mark, or the HP Photosmart Premium for $185, which Consumer Reports rated at 70 for a price point of $300 and gave it one of the "recommended buy" marks.
The Photosmart was the second highest of all the printers they rated, and got "very good" in the scanning category. It's also on sale for $65 less than the regular price and $115 less than the price Consumer Reports rated it for.
The OfficeJet "only" got "good" in the scanning category, but it's $85 cheaper than the Photosmart, and currently on sale for about $50 less than the regular price and the price Consumer Reports rated it at.
And as long as i'm tormenting myself with options...
Apartment stuff:
We've looked at about seven or eight apartment complexes so far. We've been looking them up mostly with Apartments.com and ForRent.com, and a little bit of Moogle's Real Estate search, and then checking reviews on ApartmentRatings.com, which unfortunately(?) has kind of prejudiced us against one or two apartments that seemed decent on first impression.
Currently we've got five pretty good candidates.
Valley Park: 1002 sq ft 2 Bedrooms for $1128 a month. First month and a half is free if we sign by the 31st. The parking situation looks kinda nasty there unless we pay $25 per month for an extra carport spot, but there's no guarantee there'd actually be a free spot to rent. The combined kitchen/dining area is almost completely cut off from the living room which bothers me, and i'm told that the design in the kitchen was pretty ugly, which bothered
shelleycat. It's also not exactly close to anything.Huntington Manor: 950 sq ft 2 Bedrooms for $1200 a month. First month is free. The bedrooms seemed rather small, and it seems like there is no dishwasher. (We didn't think to check at the time, but that was listed as a con on the ratings site and when we checked the brochure it's not listed as one of the amenities.) Even less close to anything than Valley Park though.
We've also started considering one bedroom apartments.
shelleycat thinks she might be okay with that as long as she reserves the right to make me sleep in the living room from time to time when she feels like she needs privacy.Grande: 755 sq ft 1 Bedroom for $1135 a month. $150 off the first month. A little expensive for a 1 bedroom, but there's no pet rent, it has decently sized rooms, a mostly open kitchen, lots of storage space, and it's on the same corner as the local Famima and the 405 onramp and it's right across the street from the Fresh & Easy and Del Taco and a mom & pop diner that
shelleycat likes. The big downside to this one is that they'd just rented out the last free $1135 one. It is month to month though (another plus) so one might become available if we're willing to wait for a bit.Sycamore Valley: 767 sq ft 1 Bedroom for $1050 a month. No move-in specials. It has the same room layout as the Grande (it's owned by the same company and the manager at the Grande was the person who brought the complex to our attention) but it's a bit shabbier and the fixtures in the apartment aren't as nice. Also, despite being from the same company this one has pet rent even though Grande doesn't. It's also not particularly close to anything of interest, though it's relatively close to the freeway. The complex does have a couple jacuzzis though, which
shelleycat thinks is a plus. However, the $1050 price was supposedly the "move in special," which seems like a dumb idea to me, and it also supposedly was just for last weekend, so theoretically the price could be different now. However they did call shelleycat on monday to try and convince her that the special price might go away. That tells me that the price probably isn't really at risk, and such pressure tactics don't really make me think better of the management there.Sandpiper: 760 sq ft 1 Bedroom for $1049 a month. First month is free. There's also no pet rent _and_ they pay for water, trash and gas. It also has at least one jacuzzi. We haven't actually looked at the 1 bedroom model yet (we were still focused on 2 bedrooms only when we first toured it) but the one we did see seemed to have reasonably sized rooms. It's moderately close to the freeway, and it's on Beach (just south of Warner) so it's also fairly close to the mall, DVD Planet, BevMo, BJs, etc. The only particular downside we've heard is that there are dogs in just about every downstairs apartment, and they're often rather noisy. One of the downsides of such a universally pet friendly place.
I was kind of hoping we'd be able to get down at least to $1000 by looking at 1 bedrooms, but no luck with that so far. I do notice however that if i do a search on Redondo Beach that neither my current (relatively cheap) apartment nor most of the other apartments on this block show up. I wonder if somewhere in Huntington Beach/Fountain Valley/Westminster there's a congregation of slightly older and smaller but cheap and decent apartments. Unfortunately if there is i have no idea how to go about finding it =P Other than the way that i found this place of course, spending a couple weeks driving around until i tripped over it.
Edit:
shelleycat thinks we should do a poll :)Any opinions about which we should do?
Pick one
Keep looking
6(100.0%)
Valley Park (despite parking and ugly kitchen)
0(0.0%)
Huntington Manor ("despite tiny second bedroom")
0(0.0%)
Wait for Grande to open up
0(0.0%)
Sycamore Valley
0(0.0%)
Sandpiper
0(0.0%)
