I love Raleigh, the people are SO nice here. The same can definitely be said for the friendly folks at this Extended StayAmerica location. I'm in Raleigh for a couple of weeks on assignment and whenever I can I like to stay at an Extended StayAmerica hotel. It's so nice to be able to make your own healthy meals in the kitchen rather than eat in a restaurant or resort to fast food. This location couldn't have been better as far as having a ton of restaurants and stores nearby and being right off of one of the main corridors through Raleigh, Capital Blvd. The hotel is at the end of a quiet, dead-end street about a block or less from a great little shopping area with a Trader Joe's and a couple of excellent restaurants. There's a really nice shopping area about two minutes away with a huge Target store and Starbucks and other nice shops.

The hotel was freshly remodeled, but my room wasn't quite as nice as I had come to expect at this chain's other locations. And, this could have been just my room so the others may be perfectly fine. It did have great wireless service (either $5 a day or $5 for the entire stay, I heard both) and the kitchen was great. There isn't an oven, but it's nice to have a full-size refrigerator with a freezer, a two-burner cooktop, and a kitchen sink.

It was dark out when I got to the hotel to check in and it made me a bit uneasy to see people outside smoking in their cars/trucks with their windows down watching me unload the car. I didn't know if they were hotel guests or visitors or what. I'm always paranoid about leaving my car parked outside at night anyway and then to have several people watching me bring camera gear and laptops, etc, out of the back of my car.. yeah, not a good feeling. After almost a half-hour at the front desk (there were other folks there and lots of calls, etc), I made it up to my room on the 2nd floor. I always ask for the top floor and it bums me out when I don't get the top floor, especially in wood-framed hotels with wood floor joists. There's always someone in the room above me practicing on a pogo stick or something.. This time, it was the typical loud-heel-walker, but he/she also happened to have at least one dog. The sound of dog's paws / nails on the floor constantly was a bit much. The barking wasn't as annoying because we have two dogs but the constant chick-chick-chick of the nails on the floor, back and forth.. AHHHHHHHHH!!

There weren't that many cars in the parking lot so I'm guessing that they weren't full, I just didn't get a top floor room for some reason. Maybe they weren't done with the remodeling up there yet, or maybe it's reserved for smoking rooms. Then, and it rarely happens to me, when I got up to my room, the room key didn't open the door. So I carried my bags back downstairs and again there were people at the front desk so I waited for the nice young woman to redo the card. She was really great; super nice, funny, polite, just seemed like a great person. When I got into the room the first thing I noticed was that the curtains were sort of hanging down at the top where they come together. Since it was dark outside and now it was light inside the room, everyone that was outside smoking knew what room I was in. Sweet. I noticed that the curtain pins were missing from the top-ends of the curtains on both sides so they weren't going to stay closed unless I took a pin out of the middle and put them in the ends, which I did. Then, as usual, once the fan came on, the curtains bellowed out so I had to put a phone book on the bottom to hold the bottom of the curtain in.

The bathroom was really where the room started to lose its luster for me. Luckily I brought a hairdryer with me because there wasn't one here, which a was rare thing to not have a wall-mounted hairdryer in the bathroom. Also, the toilet sounded like it was running fairly often but then the sound would go away and it would be quiet again for a day or two. Then, a couple of days ago as I was getting out of the shower, I heard the sound of "hotel water" (that LOUD sound of water in adjacent rooms), or so I thought. It was actually the sound of the toilet and water running over the top of the tank! I immediately shut off the water and soaked up the water with a towel, luckily there wasn't more than a cup or two of water on the floor and it was brand new sheet vinyl that was nicely caulked around everything. Because the phone in the room didn't work I went downstairs to tell them about it and they sent up their SUPER nice handyman, what a great, great guy. You just can't find people like this gentleman and if you're lucky enough to have him on your team you do not want to lose him. He looked over the problem and ran down to get new parts and then totally rebuilt the toilet in probably ten minutes! He then asked if everything else was ok in the room and I half-jokingly said, "well, other than the guy and his dogs in the room upstairs.. ".. He noticed that the curtains hadn't been changed to the new ones from the new remodeling so he went down and got the new curtains and installed them along with the wands to open & close the curtains. He even put on deflector on the heater/ac unit so the curtains wouldn't "bellow" out when the fan came on! What a super guy he was and he seemed to really care if everything was ok in the room. He treated everything as if he personally owned the hotel, that's service that is a very rare thing and is much-appreciated by guests. I'm glad the next person in that room won't have to deal with that again since that handyman changed them out to the nice new curtains and added the heat/ac diverter.

Ultimately, I ended up checking out two days early from this hotel, mainly because of the noise from the guy above and the people next door. It was one of the loudest spots I've been in for adjacent room noise. All the remodeling in the world can't fix construction that doesn't include soundproofing. They did a nice job with the remodeling and finishes, but I'd still like to see a new bathroom faucet (this one was an old two-handle one that squeaks) and especially a new shower head. The water shooting out of the shower head is actually painful, no lie. I seriously debated going to a hardware store and buying a new one and putting it on myself, it was that painful to take a shower. There are two settings, high and off, with the twist handle / temperature knob. You can't adjust the pressure and it really SHOOTS needles of water out of that shower head, I've never had that experience before. I had to use my hand to divert the water, it was literally that painful. $50 for a new bathroom sink faucet and a new low-flow shower head would complete that room remodeling and would be money very, very well spent in my opinion.

The TV was really nice; a brand new flat screen that swiveled far enough to see from the kitchen area. The only thing is that there are so few cable channels other than sports to choose from. There are excellent local channels and an excellent PBS channel, but not much other than TBS/TNT/CNN/Showtime and all the sports channels you can imagine. No TCM, History, HGTV, Food, Travel, etc. For someone that ends up working in the room for days at a time when I'm on the road it's nice to have a bigger selection of channels. It seemed odd to have such a nice, high-end, expensive TV with so few channels.

All in all, the people here really saved this stay for me. They were all super nice and any employer should thank their lucky stars that they have such a great team working for / with them. But, I probably wouldn't stay here again, the noise in the rooms above and next door is too much for me. The price was great and it seemed like a safe area, but for me, I need a quieter room when I'm in a spot for more than a day.