My wife and I have lived in a townhouse here for a few years and are finally moving out to get a bigger place.

Overall, it's a nice place. Starting with the good points - the townhouses all have a full washer and dryer. A very nice amenity. The master bedroom has a vaulted ceiling, and there are two ceiling fans in each room upstairs.

It's close to the bus to the Arlington Heights Metra station, right down the street from a park, and reasonably close to a forest preserve (Buffalo Creek). The management is very friendly and helpful (with one or two exceptions), and the maintenance staff is very fast in getting things taken care of.

There are ample electrical outlets and phone jacks, but only 2 cable hookups (one in the living room and one in the master bedroom). The third bedroom has OHM connectors to hook into the antenna on the roof.

The closets are fairly spacious, the one in the master bedroom is good, the second bedroom is acceptable, but a bit smaller and more oddly shaped. We still easily fit three sets of shelves inside of it, though.

As for the bad points -

The layout of the townhouse is peculiar. The staircase is right in the middle of the floor and both bathrooms are upstairs (two full sized baths). I would've preferred 1 upstairs and perhaps a half downstairs. The staircase in the middle of the floor really chops up the rooms into 4 smaller ones, if it were up against the wall instead, it would be a *much* more open layout and just feel substantially larger.

The walls are paper thin. If you want to hang anything on them, you'll need to put in some serious heavy duty drywall anchors to be able to attach anything heavier than a small photograph. Anything less than that would be ripped out from the weight of whatever you're hanging.

You can also frequently hear your neighbors. If you have children next door to you, expect to hear them playing or shouting or such. Occasionally have problems with neighbors playing their music too loudly, but they're usually courteous. And by "frequently hear your neighbors", I want to emphasize the degree - you can hear doors closing in other townhouses, the water turning on in the sink, television, furniture squeaking, the works. Usually everyone is fairly courteous about it, though. Everyone knows that the walls are thin and are polite about not being too loud for too long. The walls are also very easy to damage, and collect dirt very fast. It's difficult to clean them once they're dirty.

Maintenance is very good. 99% of the time they'll have someone out that day and fix any problems. On rare occasions, they'll incorrectly fix something and you'll need to call back, but they've always gotten it taken care of the second time.

Have had one major problem with it - the window in the main bedroom separated from the frame, but they were unable to repair it, kept claiming that there was no visible issue, which is a load of BS. I ended up just having to tape around the window in the winter.

Heating and cooling is a problem. During the winter, on cold days (1 degree outside), I had major trouble heating the place. With the furnace set on _87_ degrees, I couldn't get the inside temperature above 59. Very unacceptable. Overall, the downstairs tends to be too cold and the upstairs tends to be too hot, both in the summer and the winter. A few portable heaters in the winter help with the cold, but the heat upstairs in the summer is much more of a problem.

The electricity is fairly good, but it's a little bit dirty. You might want to get a voltage regulator for a computer, just to be safe. A few of the outlets are not securely attached to the walls, and the whole faceplate rattles around.

There have been problems with water leaks inside the walls, but nothing that's gotten external to damage anything. We can just hear it leaking in the walls during heavy rains or when showering.

One of the upstairs bedrooms doesn't have a cable hookup, so I had to run a cable across the staircase and into the bedroom.


I don't mean to badmouth the place too much. There are certainly problems with it, but realistically everybody is going to keep a list of the things wrong with a place and gloss over the good points. Overall, this place has some problems, but for the money it's a good deal. The washer and dryer alone make it worthwhile. And, despite the issues, in all seriousness the only reason that we're looking at moving is because we've just run out of space! 990 square feet was fine when we moved in, but we've just acquired more things and need more room.

If we could still fit in the space, we'd probably continue to hang out here for a few more years.

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