Moving: Part I

I feel like I am emerging from a very busy month of packing and moving into a new condo. Being on this end of the move makes me really happy! Moving is hard work and there is a lot of preparation and planning that needs to take place to get you from one home to another. It's not as simple as filling a moving truck with your things and moving on down the road!

The Hubs and I had been looking at new places to rent off and on all spring and summer, just keeping our options open for someplace bigger and with more perks. The apartment we lived in since we were married worked well for us at the time, but we (or shall we say our things and our lifestyle) were quickly outgrowing it's small size.

After having moved and getting settled into our new place (which I will share more about later), I do have a few things that I really did love about our old apartment. I loved that our living, dining rooms and kitchen were all one big great room.

Our open concept living area

Albiet, the room wasn't big enough for us, our oversized furniture, or for entertaining more than two other people, but I grew to love cooking in the kitchen while still being able to interact with others in the living room and to quickly serve a meal to the dining table (about a half turn and one step from the stove. And, we loved the kitchen of our old place. There were a lot of cupboards, tons of counter space and the appliances were great. We had a flat top stove, built in microwave, a fridge with the drawer freezer on the bottom and a nice sized dishwasher.

But, outside of the kitchen and the open concept main living area, there were many things to not love about our place, starting with the closet sized washroom with the permanently stained (before our time) bathtub. I think I braved a bath once in that tub after thoroughly bleaching the entire thing. Something I learned about apartment hunting after this experience: ALWAYS check the bathroom! The tub wasn't the only problem though, there was very little storage and room to move in that bathroom.

Owen loved drinking from the tap in our disgusting tub! Way worse in person!

Also, we were quickly running out of storage room in our old place. The bedrooms were small and the closets full. By the end, the spare room (which housed an old pull out couch for guests) was full of junk and things that we wouldn't even let people see the room when they came over.

One of our many stuffed closets. Torah, ever curious that she is, HAD to check it out!

 

Our old apartment also didn't have central air or a balcony. As avid barbeque lovers, it was hard to go through two summers without BBQ. Suffice to say our new place has outdoor space and we will more that likely getting a BBQ before spring. I am willing to brave the cold for that BBQ flavor!

So, all of that to say, we were on the hunt for a new place since the spring. But, having a list of must haves for a new place to live (central air, outdoor space, dishwasher, storage, insuite laundry, more space) we weren't in a rush to move until we found the RIGHT place. We had looked at a few apartment buildings and weren't really in love. Either there was lots of space and the layout or the building was really old and dingy or the location wasn't right or it would have been more of a lateral move instead of a move to sometime better. So, we kept looking...

One day I was looking on MLS (realtor.ca) at homes (something I like to do off and on, to dream about homes we might buy sometime down the road) and I happened to search for homes for rent. Up popped a condo in a complex that we had already looked at in the past and fell IN LOVE with but the circumstances of renting that particular place from the owner were kind of fishy and we ended up not pursuing the condo. It just so happened that this condo had just been put up for rent because the owner was having a hard time selling it (I honestly don't know why!!! Maybe because people want more than 2 bedrooms in a home?) and needed to start having some sort of income coming in because she had relocated to Toronto. We went to see it, and a few short days later, the place was ours. It really was a surreal experience because this condo was even better than we could have imagined and better than the other unit in the complex that we had seen.

Then started the waiting game. We had to give our notice at our current apartment and start making arrangements and start packing to move. I feel like it was a long wait, but we are finally here and (mostly) settled. I honestly couldn't be happier with our new home! We have been having fun finding places for things and decorating!

More on our new place and our adventures in decor to come in the next post, but here's a sneak peak of our new home!