Living at The Villas at ParkMerced

I believe that by the time I am writing this, this complex is no longer called the name in the title. However, it's about the same place; The Villas at ParkMerced, ParkMerced or whatever it is called. 

Link to their website is: http://www.parkmerced.com/

I'm going to say one thing before we move on to the negatives. If you are someone who likes your lawns constantly watered and taken care of. Your hedges trimmed. Your grass cut. Your buildings painted (on the outside). Then ParkMerced does this tremendously well. They take care of the external surroundings extremely well. People who visit us constantly comment that this is a very beautiful complex. And I agree. But it is all superficial.

JULY 2006

My wife and I move into ParkMerced. The move-in experience should have been indication of things to come. However, due to our travel schedule for work, we were having a hard time looking for something else. 

We had scheduled our move for a Saturday. We also rented (that means we will be paying for it!) a storage space. However, when we went to pick up our keys on Saturday, we were informed that the employee in charge of the storage space was not around and we would have no access to the storage. That would mean that we could continue with our move on Saturday but we would have to leave everything that we were supposed to put in storage either in our apartment OR we would have to do another move on Sunday. Since we were getting help to move, we decided against dragging the move over 2 days and to push everything to Sunday. 

On Sunday, we moved. New problem. The storage space that we had selected was not available to us. Apparently, it had some items left behind and the management did not know if it was someone's abandoned items OR if the storage had been broken into and THERE WAS NO WAY TO TELL, IN THEIR RECORDS, IF THE SPACE BELONGED TO ANYONE. This is usually a sign of the level of competence of an office/organization/management. Due to time constraints, we picked another available space.

The storage space is ParkMerced resembles a dungeon. I'm not complaining about that because, it is but a storage space. However, it is very dark in there. When we first viewed the storage space, the person who showed it to us tried turning on the light (there is only ONE light to serve an area about 400-500sf), but it did not work. He suggested it was blown and he would get someone to replace it. When we moved in, it was about 10 days after we had looked at the storage space. There was still no light. We replaced it with our own because it would have been too dark to work in there, storing our items.