My sister and I are completing our final lease at the lane and are ready to go. However I'd like to discuss the great things we did enjoy about living here.
1. The apartment complex is still fairly new and the appliances, fixtures and styling are nice. We don't have any kind of pest issues or many mechanical issues. I will add though that many of our cabinet doors squeak and grind but I went ahead and fixed that. Additionally, our apartment does have some water damage from the laundry machine in the apartment above us, leaking through our ceiling. The first time it happened we had to throw a few things away.
2. Neighborhood: the Upper Arlington neighborhood is very safe and extremely walkable. Across the street there is a short shopping complex with a Whole Foods, which is convenient when you need groceries fast. There are also restaurants on the first floor of our building that we were able to try and enjoyed. However, parking in the garage on the first and lower level as a resident is difficult because you are constantly competing for parking with restaurant goers. It is minutes from the OSU campus and student parking lots, in addition to being quite close to 315 which gets you to 270 and 670 quite quickly.
3. Parking: The second floor residential garage ($50/month) used to allow all residents and when the new management came in they only now allow one car per pass, each additional car pass is another monthly fee. I let my sister have the pass and now I park down stairs. The incline to the second floor garage is basically 45 degrees, and it's steep. I drive a stick and could manage it, but it really is a hassle for manuals and larger vehicles. There are not a ton of larger spots for full sized trucks and SUVs just based on the construction. There is a surface lot out back, but you compete for spots there as well.
4. Amenities: There is not an extensive list of amenities but they do have a small gym on the second floor, a patio with two grills, a trash shoot, and recycling on site. Also, water is included which is a nice bonus! There is a small community room on the 3rd floor and a small conference room with a public restroom right outside so you don't have to run up to go to the bathroom. The courtyard was redone two summers ago and it's pretty drab now, as it has gray concrete tiles and black tables, and not much else. Each apartment (to my knowledge) has a balcony, some are interior facing the courtyard and the others are on the exterior. Ours faces the courtyard and new management has recently told us that only patio furniture is allowed, requiring us to remove our patio plants and lights from the balcony. Many others do plants and lights but for some reason we were told we were not allowed to do that. The gym includes 2 treadmills, one short stack of weights, 5 medicine balls, one bosu ball, one multi use machine, two Ellipticals, one bike, and a couple of mats. However the space is not very large since it is located within the residential garage.
5. The apartment itself: We live in a 2BD/2BA split, where the primary is on one side of the living room/kitchen and the guest on the other side. We like the layout, but there simply isn't much storage space throughout.
Now for the reasons we are definitely ready to go:
1. My sister has lived here a total of 4 years and myself with her for 2 years. The old management has a few older policies that were a bit odd but they were always helpful, kind, and accommodating. Our new management which we've had a little over a year now, has come in to enforce every line on our lease. We had to throw away our planters on our balcony for violating the lease, when others did not.
2. The walls are extremely thin in our complex. You will be able to hear conversations in apartments adjacent or above/below you. We have lived around young families with screaming children in the middle of the night, loud snorers next door, party goers blasting music, and you can even hear someone else's phone vibrate on a table in another apartment.
3. The traffic patterns surrounding our complex are odd, to say the least. Turning left out of our complex requires you go out the back way to one of the two traffic lights. There are right-only turn lanes to exit the complex. The traffic lights you are made to turn left out of are not highly sensitive; I have sat at that light for nearly 10 minutes. read more