After a grueling search over the past six days, I secured a place to stay in Delft for the remainder of my time here! It’s this place on Airbnb, though the photo is quite staged, and it is decidedly messier in real life, but not too bad. The owner, Florian, lives upstairs in the same apartment, and I think I will get along with him swimmingly. He is 36, and he works with some organization that does cleanup of plastics in the ocean. I didn’t get the details on it, but it seems to be some sort of technology-based solution. They are based at TU Delft. He spent some time in the Boston area working with Dassault Systems, which is best known for their 3d modeling software called Solidworks. That’s what we mainly used in the industrial design program at RISD when we did 3d modeling, which was actually somewhat rare.

I actually connected with Florian through another housing site called Kamernet, so we arranged a monthly rent amount which is much lower than the equivalent of 30x the per day price on Airbnb and well under the 800 Euro / month that I budgeted. I visited the place last night. Florian had a lot of other inquiries through airbnb, so he wanted to make sure I was serious about renting (and could put down something for a deposit) before he told the others it was taken. I thought about actually arranging the place via airbnb though with an adjusted rent amount that we agreed on so that I’d be able to pay by credit card and we would both have some security in the deal. We tried to do that, but when I looked at the total amount I would be paying including the airbnb service fees, it turned out to be exorbitant. I thought they just charged a flat service fee, but it seems to be based partly on the total rental cost. I realized this on the train when I was leaving his place, and I freaked out a bit since I thought it might compromise the deal if I made him wait any longer. I contacted him and offered to make a deposit via Paypal that evening. He said that he didn’t have Paypal, but told me not to worry – I would get the room, and I could pay by cash or bank transfer next time I was in Delft. He also said that he trusted me, which blew my mind a bit given my situation of knowing basically nobody here.

I brought him 50 Euro as a deposit this morning, and he hand wrote a rental agreement since his printer wasn’t working. When I get home, I may want to print this out and frame it. I actually kind of want to frame it when I move in to the place, but that might be weird.

Oh, and as a bonus, the apartment has a dishwasher, which I would have put as an item on my housing search spreadsheet, but I didn’t think it would be possible for me to find in my situation!

Time to rent a bike and go on an aimless long ride this afternoon (thanks for the idea, Em)!