Our rental apartment here in Mazatlan is tiny. It’s almost new, has nice appliances, solar panels, water purification; however it has purple walls and an orange chair and a loud water pump on the roof directly above the bed. We are impatient to have a bigger place and to get our household items out of storage.

Our landlord couple has been renovating a house and going all out to make it very nice. It’s one level, has a pool and jacuzzi, and is even closer to the downtown area than our apartment. The rent will be high but we decided to rent for a year to be sure if we wanted to buy and what area of town we would prefer. Until……

The house is just 3 blocks from us and we stopped in from time to time to see the progress. I was impatient to see the tile and wall colors…..until I didn’t. They painted all the walls a saturated flat grey/blue. I struggled with that until I decided I could liven things up with red accents and pictures. Oops, no nails are allowed in the walls, therefore no pictures. The floor tile was a nice tan-like color with yellow splashes. That doesn’t exactly go with grey/blue but oh well. Then the bathrooms walls were tiled and they were shiny pure white. Big clash with the flooring. Then the landlady said she had ordered a sectional and it would be delivered soon. I asked what color it was and at first she didn’t remember and then said she thinks she ordered brown. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. How do you nicely ask a person if they are color blind?

Just to backtrack. In April we contacted a realtor that had a condo listing we were interested in but it went under contract the day after we looked at it. He went back to Canada and turned us over to a young newish realtor in his office named Elizabeth. Since about July she had emailed me with listings and none interested me but she kept trying to discern what exactly we wanted. I didn’t really know and I kept telling her I didn’t want her to waste time on us because we were so unsure.

The very afternoon that I learned about the brown couch, Elizabeth emailed that another agent in her office had a contract from a seller to list a condo on the malecon overlooking the ocean. He had not even taken pictures yet and it would be about 3 days before it went into the multiple listing service. He agreed to let us immediately view it and the minute we walked in the door I knew I wanted it. The newer condos are all so ultra modern and this one is 16 years old, very tastefully furnished and with basically the same colors as our house in San Carlos.

Below is our San Carlos living room and you can see we like a little life in our colors. I would have had to go on anti-depressants with those grey/blue walls.

I think we hit the jackpot with the condo and now we are just waiting for a closing date. Having a realtor that is new turned out to be a bonus because she actually looked for a property for us. The previous realtor sent us a list of websites to look on and expected us to find or own place. I hear that this is common in Mazatlan. And there is not one website to look on but several. Also, almost every choice property goes under contract within 24 hours. Every place we were interested in that we saw on those sites was actually already under contract but the realtors don’t remove them until after closing. Mazatlan is the hot place to move to right now.

We will be living on the 11th floor and that will take getting used to when we have always lived in houses. Steve is so happy to no longer have a house and yard to maintain. This will be truly a vacation 365 days a year.