el crispito

In Mexico, when gringos rent places, they are nearly always required to have what is known as a fijador, or in English, a guarantor. This is a Mexican professional that is pretty much what it sounds like: someone who will guarantee payment for the term of the contract. That is all well and good if you happen to actually know someone that will do this for you, but sadly, we don't. I knew that would be a problem, and since arriving we found only one place that said they didn't require that, and it was a residential hotel.

We figured that, as is the case with most things everywhere, cash would solve the problem, and so it did. I offered the landlord six months in advance, he insisted on eight, and we agreed to that. The place is in a great neighborhood, very near a Laundromat, fairly close to a grocery store and the price is nice for a two-bedroom place: $4,000 pesos per month, or at the current rate of exchange, $379 USD.

It has a decent walk-in closet in the main bedroom, a thin strip of balcony in the front that is accessible by the two bedrooms and another little square balcony that is accessible from the dining room area. The floors throughout the entire place are red tiles. The bathroom is tiled in a terrible café, which matches the color of the toilet and the washbasin. The front balcony railing has round extensions that line it, to hold large flowerpots.

We also get one of the little spaces on the top of the apartment that were designed to be slave quarters. Well, quarters for the domestic help, but I can't imagine that anyone ever lived there. They are like big rooftop closets with dinky bathrooms that are not closed off from the elements, and they have been converted to serve as utility rooms where tenants can have a washer and dryer if they want. I didn't see any such equipment in any of them, and the bathroom in ours has fallen into serious disrepair. A cluster of two-inch long cockroaches litters ours. Maybe we could use it for storage of boxes or something. It doesn't look like anyone in the building uses them at all. The coin-op laundry across the corner is probably a much better option.

The main drawbacks, apart from the disturbing bathroom (in addition to being brown, it is also dingy and the toilet looks like it was imported from the worst bathroom in Scotland), are kitchen related. As I said before, it's small; it's probably six or seven feet long and about four feet wide. It doesn't have a dishwasher, nor a place for a dishwasher. And in the place for the stove, well, there's a line for gas that you can run to your stove. Yes, we have to buy our own stove...and our own refrigerator.

In some ways, this is not so bad. In the past, I have always had terrible stoves in such cheap apartments, and at least this way, I will have one that I bought that is (hopefully) one that meets my high standards for things kitchen related. And there isn't much room for a fridge in the kitchen anyway, so I think I'm going to have to put that around the corner in the main area. This area is pretty big, so that will not be too much of a problem. But I was thinking that instead of having just one big refrigerator, perhaps I could have two smaller ones, locating one in the area we will use for our living room and another closer to the kitchen. Then we could keep water, drinks and other snacks in the living room one, and meal ingredients in the one near the kitchen. Why, I might even take a cue from Martha Stewart and rebuild the cabinets to have refrigerated drawers.

That is another thing about Mexican apartment rental: while any maintenance is up to the renter, they are permitted to do pretty much anything they want to the place. In our case, I'd like to retile the bathroom and replace the fixtures. I think that's going to be the first big project, well, after hiring an exterminator to give it a thorough going over, painting the walls and adding light fixtures. Currently all the lights in the place are bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling by wires.

One handy thing is that the place already has the electricity, gas and water turned on. The water is included in the rent, and we get a monthly bill left in our mailbox for electricity. With gas, the entire building gets a bill, and we pay some designated person. I don't quite understand yet how that is going to work, but we'll see. Apparently that is relatively common here for apartment buildings.

We are relatively happy with it. It is in the neighborhood we wanted, it's cheap, and it has lots of windows. That is something hard to find in apartments, and not only here. There seem to be a lot of places that have only one window to the world, and that is the sliding glass door on the far end of the apartment. This has windows in every room in the place, including our Silence of the Lambs bathroom. So we will try it out for a year and see what we can do with it in that time. With labor being so very, very cheap here, I suspect that we can whip it into shape pretty cheaply and make it into a decent place, where we might end up spending several years.