5740 MacCall St

Welcome to your big sunny 1-bedroom apartment, just half a mile from the Temescal shopping area. It’s on the ground floor of a sunny, remodeled 2-story Queen Anne Cottage (with 3 apartments altogether). I offer a $100/month good tenant rebate for paying rent on time, not disturbing me (upstairs) or the back tenant, and wheeling our trash cans to the curb on Wednesday nights. (You receive it at the end of each month.) There's no application fee. Cats OK, but no dogs. The apt is 650 square feet -- bigger than some 2-bedroom apartments. It’s in a charming 3-unit triplex that feels more like a big house than an apartment building. Features: - Double pane windows to keep noise out and heat in. - Private fenced yard with a pluot tree. - Two closets. - New granite kitchen counters and granite bathroom vanity - Very big kitchen - New heater - New paint - Offstreet parking, and easy street parking for guests..... - Sunny windows on 3 sides. In larger apartment buildings, you’re lucky to get windows on two sides, and you're often looking at a neighbor's wall..... NEIGHBORHOOD It's in a safe and quiet part of Oakland, minutes from Berkeley and Rockridge. The area is very flat, so it's easy to bike around town. Most neighbors are homeowners who've been here a long time. They take good care of their homes and lawns. It's on a quiet tree lined street, not a noisy main avenue. It's not even a through street, and it's got speed bumps. The UC Berkeley campus is about 2 miles away. If you want to take a bus there, you can catch the AC transit bus one block from my house. It's also an easy bike ride (2 miles away). It's about 1 mile from the nearest BART subway stations (Ashby or Rockridge), and half a mile from Whole Foods Market and the Temescal shopping area. There are also two Farmer's Market's in walking distance. Every Tuesday from 2 - 6:30pm, you can walk to the South Berkeley Farmer's Market. And every Sunday from 10am-1pm, you can walk to the Temescal Farmer's Market. Both are VERY festive, with a variety of live musicians, music groups, and vendors selling freshly made food. By car, you'll be about 8 minutes from the Bay bridge. You get 1 off-street parking spot. There’s also plenty of space for guests to park on our street, and no permit is required. LAUNDRY For your laundry, there are two local businesses that will pick up your laundry, wash, dry, fold, and return it to your door. One is J-and-L. One is Hambrick Laundry. Or for even less money, you can drop off your laundry to Hambrick Laundry in the morning. They will wash, dry, and fold it, and have it ready for you that same evening. If you're on a budget, my ex-girlfriend (for whom ambiance is very important!) recommends Washingtown. It is 11 blocks away at Adeline St in Berkeley. It is clean, there is parking, there are large skylights and plants inside. LOW EMFs My back tenant is sensitive to EMFs. To help her and everyone else in my triplex sleep better, I’ve covered our Smart Meters with radiation shields. And all of us who live here use Ethernet for our laptops, and low-EMF wifi routers for our smart phones. If you’d like to save the cost of renting a modem from Comcast or Sonic, I’ll give you a low-EMF wifi router too. And to give your laptop the fastest possible connection, I'll provide you with an Ethernet cable and Ethernet/USB adapter. If you want to use it, you can just plug it into a USB port. SHARED WALLS There’s another downstairs tenant (currently a couple) whose kitchen wall borders your bedroom. They respect quiet hours (10pm-8am), and I filled that wall with insulation to muffle sound, but it’s not completely soundproof. You won't hear any showers or flushing toilets from upstairs. But you may hear muffled voices through your bedroom wall. So this apartment is a good choice if you’re a pretty heavy sleeper and used to living in an apartment with neighbors around you. That said, I've advertised this as a quiet building to my other tenants, and I'd love to keep that promise. So while it's not required, all of us who live here now are hoping that our new neighbor values quiet too, and does most of their socializing away from home. The security deposit is one month’s rent. If you have cats, there’s an additional $600 pet deposit. Absolutely no dogs.