What the company had offered was 1 month of paid housing and the car rental.
My husband didn't start working until October 7, so we had 2 weeks to do everything we had to do, otherwise I would have to do it by myself and I certainly didn't feel prepared at that time.
Two things were the most important for us: housing and transportation.
Housing
First thing you need to decide is where you want to live, and that will depend almost exclusively on whether you have school age kids or not, and also but to a lesser extent, on where your work is located. And house prices will depend on the schools of the district, being a lot more expensive those houses in good school district.
Our daughter wasn't on that phase yet so we didn't factor the schools in on the decision.
After touring a little around the different cities on the candidacy to being our new home we decided that we wanted to live in Mountain View, and we didn't know that Mountain View was getting crazy expensive at that time!!
We had to dismiss the wish of living in a single family house as we were going to be a one income household for a while and you can't find single family houses for less than 3.5k per month.
So what was left? Yes! Apartment communities... there are hundreds of apartment communities in Mountain View, in fact they are the only way for Mountain View to hold the humungous amount of immigration that has been arriving to the city since Google decided to have their headquarters here.
We visited dozens of communities in a couple of days, we were lost, we didn't know which one to choose, all of them were resort like communities with heated swimming pools, fitness rooms and tennis courts. We visited Aviana Apartments, Highland Gardens, Americana Apartments and others, and finally we decided to rent a townhouse in Central Park at Whisman.
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| Our townhouse at the Central Park at Whisman Community |
We chose this community after a lot of reading in Yelp even though the price was expensive, in my opinion, 2825 usd at that time (today they are renting them for 3565 usd). But that's not all, besides from the price (at least in that community, others include the expenses in the advertised price) you had to consider that you would have to pay additionally about 150 usd per month in community expenses (energy to heat the pools, trash, and other community expenses).
They ask you to leave a deposit, normally would be 600 usd, but as we didn't have any credit history in the States we had to leave one full month rent as a deposit. They also did not want to do a full year lease, only an 8 month lease, even though we wanted a year (we didn't know then that the 8 month lease would be useful as we would find a new place 6 months into the lease).
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| Central Park at Whisman Community |
The move in was easy and the life at the community was fine, although I never felt like if I was at home in that place, the carpet, the stairs, the floor plant was kind of weird, the patio was not usable, the fear that when the lease was over they would hugely raise the rent... so I decided to give me some time and try to look for another place calmly, without rush that we had at the beginning, when the lease was about to end, but that's going to be another story.
Useful sites to look for house/apartment:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/
http://www.padmapper.com/
If you have to consider the school district you need to check if the place you want to rent is well located:
http://www.greatschools.org/
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