Good in general; great for the price (at least in this area).
From:
bluebutterfliesgirl
Date posted:
5/15/2005
Years at this apartment:
2002
-
2004
Donaldson Park Apartments is on the "bad side" of Highland Park, which is to say that it's mostly middle-class instead of upper-middle-class. It's not as convenient as living closer to downtown, but if you don't mind walking, all the shops you need are 20 minutes' walk or less. And it is only minutes on foot from Donaldson Park.
We (my housemate and I) lived there for two years; we picked it because it was a central location (at the time, I had to travel all over NJ for work), affordable compared to other complexes in the area, and allowed cats. (Warning: the lease says "no pets." The on-site management swears this only means "no dogs" and certainly everyone we knew had a cat, rabbit, guinea pig, snake, etc. But if you're paranoid, you might want to skip it.) Our apartment had two bedrooms (one quite small, adequate for a child but cramped for an adult with a double bed), two bathrooms, living room (enormous, we kept our dining table there as well), dining room (which we used as an office), and large kitchen. It also had tons of storage: a large coat closet in the living room, large pantry in the kitchen, two closets in each bedroom. Our apartment's previous tenants had trashed it, so we were lucky enough to have a completely new kitchen (cabinets, floor and appliances). The rest of the apartment was clean and had obviously been re-painted and had the floors re-finished, though it was rather generic. One bathroom was pink and the other blue, which was sort of nice compared to stark white, assuming you don't mind pink or blue. There was one air conditioner in the living room and one in the master bedroom. We had a balcony with a sliding glass door, which was lovely in nice weather. There were plenty of electrical outlets, and the apartment got a lot of light.
Problems: The biggest problem was noise. We could hear the people above us quite clearly, even though they'd laid down rugs. Even worse, our apartment was directly over the laundry roomconvenient, but annoying when someone decided to do laundry outside the posted schedule (which was 8 am to 10 pm, but people often started about 5am on weekdays and 7 am on weekends) ... or worse, decided that having a screaming fight at 2 or 3am in their apartment might annoy the neighbors, so they took it to the laundry room. The people next door also had a piano that was against the wall they shared with my bedroom, and each of their children practiced for thirty minutes twice a day, sometimes beginning quite early and ending quite late.
Parking was another problem. I'd have given it 2.5 stars if I could. There is one assigned space per car and approximately as many unassigned spaces. I'd say once or twice a month (usually when coming back late on a weekend night) I'd have to park at the opposite end of the complex. Only once in two years did I actually have to park on the street. More annoyingly, you are required to move your car from the assigned spot when it snowsannoying both because they wake you up at 8am, and because not everyone does, which means the snow plow can't get through and therefore the parking lot is a sheet of snow-covered ice for weeks (the lots between the buildings don't get any sun).
One sort-of problem: the windows were an odd shape, too wide to use one pair of curtains per window and too short also, so that 64" curtains dragged against the heaters but 36" curtains were too short. I spent a long time searching for 45"-long curtains. The windows do have blinds, so if you don't mind blinds there's no problem.
One final sort-of problem was heating in the winter. The baseboard heaters had a temperature control, but no thermostat. So we could turn the heat up or down, but what that meant in real terms depended on the outside temperature and the current inside temperature. But it was quite warm enough and if worse came to worse we opened our windows a crack (gas was included in the rent).
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