We looked at more places to move to this weekend. We saw several apartments, a house, and a townhouse. It’s astonishing the things that you learn when you’re looking for a new place to live. Things that turn out to be more important than expected. For example, we’re moving to somewhere closer to where I work. And we looked at some nice places that are not far from work, but that require I take a specific route to and from there. And that route is the same route that LOTS of other people are also taking at that time time of day. The exit off the interstate to get to that neck of the woods backs up about a mile every workday. So while I might not have as far to go, I might still be stuck in traffic for that same length of time. Or longer. So while the houses in that area are nice and quite large and sometimes quite inexpensive, other options that are smaller and a little more expensive but don’t require me to take that a road home are MUCH more appealing.
But it’s a tough call on some of them because there was one townhouse that had hardwood-looking floors throughout (except the stairs) and had a small dining room plus a formal dining room, three bedrooms upstairs, including a master that was ENORMOUS and a nice big laundry room, and two and a half baths that’s listed for exactly what we’re paying in rent right now. But there’s no pool or other amenities in the community and no outdoor storage options and the community isn’t kept up very well, so the roads have potholes and things just look run down. And it’s off the exit of doom. But WOW was that place nice looking inside.
There was another apartment building that had really nice amenities — a great exercise room with windows on three sides and an additional room for doing aerobics or yoga and even had a small ballet barre. It had a gorgeous pool with a pergola covering seating all around one edge and gas grills available for people to use at the end. But the apartment was small, with hardly enough room for our dining room table and absolutely not enough room for our sectional sofa. It had a cute built-in desk outside the guest room (that had three windows!) and the closets were both nice and big, but it was all around just too small inside.
And it turns out that things that are important to us include space for both of us to be in the kitchen at the same time, space for us to host dinner parties of at least 5 people, options for outdoor storage, lots of closet space, ease for me to get to work, and a nice, well kept outdoor space for us to wander around in.
So looking for the perfect apartment turns into this puzzle-piece thing of finding places that fit what we like but don’t quite fit all the important requirements and figuring out which ones are ones we’ll compromise on and which ones are deal breakers. And looking and looking to see if we can find one that matches all our requirements and still fits our price range and distance requirements and everything. Or if that one doesn’t exist, which is the one that we love the most of the options we’ve found.