Wildwood Apartments,
Austin, Texas

Where I worked and lived

I had a great boss, one of the best benefits of the job, Liz. Liz was business-like when she had to be, but could also be caring and full of laughs.

Here is a picture of Liz with my girls One day Liz said the nicest thing to me. She said that the day she hired me she made one of the best choices in her life.

 Although we had a radio that we could listen to, sometimes I would take in some country or Tejano music I loved and when we didn't have any customers, Liz and I would sing along. Some of the Mary Chapin-Carpenter songs were perfect for us. (Hey, if you moved to Austin, you would hear fantastic music that you fall in love with too!)

Here is a picture of Dee, who did the same things as I did, only she was part time. Sometimes Dee joined us in our songfest. Dee and Liz and I had a lot of great times, not only having fun, but we worked well together too. It seemed like we knew what needed to be done and what we did best. Although most of Liz's time was spent in running the place, and doing written reports for her bosses, there were times when the front office was full of prospective renters and wanting to be taken on tours, so she would come out from her office and lend a helping hand.

Dee decided to go to college full time and so had to work a lighter load. She is sitting at the same desk I sat at which was the one that people first came upon after entering the office area.

There was one more woman on the office staff, Marla, but I don't have a picture of her. She was the assistant manager and did a lot of the bookkeeping.

Sometimes Wildwood would sponsor parties for the residents. There is a beautiful party room that we would have the parties in. I took some pictures during one of those parties for Liz. Besides the balloons we had lots of good food.

So every once in a while I would get paid to attend a party. I really loved this job.

Some of my other duties included typing up all the papers that went in the lease packet, composing and improving those when I found things I could improve, accepting rent checks and taking work orders for problems with the apartments. I also called up references and checked up on the prospective renters job and former apartments. Dee and I also had to do a report each month comparing the prices and how full other apartments in our price range were. There was a lot of filing and entering data into the computer and also running credit checks. I also called up professional carpet cleaners when necessary and other places when something couldn't be handled by our maintenance staff.

My daughters liked me having this job. Besides the fact that I was close to home, the Wildwood staff baked cookies daily for guests. (That was another of my jobs, but I always enjoyed it. They were already prepared except for the actual baking so it was really easy to do.) I would drive my girls to school in the morning and then they rode the bus home. After school they would come in and visit me for a few minutes to let me know they were home alright. Then they would partake of a few cookies and then go back to our apartment.

They also liked going to the parties, and you can see Serena sitting here alone watching the action.

This place was so huge that at first we all got lost. When I started the job I had a general idea of where the buildings were, since they were numbered chronologically, but that didn't mean I knew which apartments were in those buildings. Some of them were two stories high and some were three stories high.

This photo on the left, is also on another one of my pages, but I wanted to put it here too because it shows some of the apartment buildings as seen just outside my entrance way. This was taken during one of the very rare snows.

I had to work my first week-end there, all alone. I had only had a few days on the job and was left with the responsibility of running the whole office on the week-end. Yikes! But it was fun too and made me feel like I was trusted. I was taking people around the property showing them vacant apartments with barely knowing anything about the place. The worst part was climbing three sets of stairs only to find out the apartment I was going to show was in a different building. Well, maybe the worst part was actually having to tell the prospective residents that I had taken them to the wrong building and that we were all going to have to go down the steps, and then back up another couple of flights of stairs!

 Another nice thing was the two swimming pools. One was right behind the party room and then there was another very near our apartment. Maybe I should mention that there were about 330 apartments there, in 22 or so buildings. It was almost like living in a small city of our own.

My husband, Chris, and one of my daughters, Serena, and I are in one of the pools.
I am trying to remember who took the picture. I probably talked my older daughter into taking this picture.

The advantage of using the back pool, besides privacy, was that there was a heated whirlpool there also. If you look at the picture on the left you will see some people sitting in it. Look towards the middle top of the picture.

The apartments themselves had four different floor plans if I remember correctly. People could choose a small one bedroom, a large one bedroom, or two different plans for the two bedroom apartments.  The smaller two bedroom had one bathroom, but we had a two bedroom, two bathroom plan for ours. The girls shared one bedroom on one side of the apartment with one bathroom across from their room. It was nice because then we had the living room and dining room/kitchen in between before you got to our bedroom. We had a bathroom with a private access from our bedroom. 

To the left is a view of the living room just as we were starting to pack up to move. You can see a few of the boxes in front of the fireplace. The window on the right is looking out into the road that winds through the apartments. On the left is a door that leads to a small patio. There is another door to that patio from our bedroom.

To the right, is a picture taken just to the left of the other view, above, and is the dining room area. We put our computer there and just used a card table for our dining table.

You can see Serena at the computer. Looking back on it now I think about what an ancient computer that was. We weren't even online yet, this was back in 1996.

I mentioned that the girls shared a bedroom. Well, they did it reluctantly. If I remember right, this was where they put some colored tape on the middle of the carpet to divide the room up. They divided up the bathroom as much as they could with separate areas for their combs, brushes and other things.

I have two pictures of their room, trying to show just their own halves.

In case you can't tell, Serena liked Dalmatian things. And if you look at Anna's room, well, you can see she likes posters of cute guys.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour of the apartments that we called home for too short of a time. I miss Austin, Texas, and I miss that job, my favorite of all time!

Look below for links to other pages I made about beautiful Austin, Texas.

Various pages about Austin, Texas

Pictures of Beautiful Austin, Texas, areas of the city.

Here you can see pictures of beautiful Austin, Texas.

Zilker park, in Austin, Texas.

Pictures of the park known in Austin for its rose garden and other beautiful flowers, as well as a place where year round activities can be found.

Pictures of Friendship Place Apartments.

Here you can see pictures of where I worked and lived in Austin.

Pictures of Unity Church in Austin

Here you can see pics of Unity Church, inside and outside and some of the people.

Pictures of My Friends in the Singles Group.

Here you can see pics of my friends in the Unity Church Singles group.

Anna in a Fashion Show in Austin.

Anna and other models in a non profit fashion show called "Fools for Fashion in Austin, Texas."

Pictures of Wildwood Apartments.

Pictures of Wildwood Apartments, where I lived and worked, some of the people and one of the pools.

Various Places I Have Visited

All about me (list of pages)

Choose whatever may interest you. (or go back to whatever page you came from)

(C) Copyright 2002 Maggie Rose. All Rights Reserved