It's official!

[I am taking a break from paper-writing to write this blog. You should feel loved!]

Well, yesterday Matt & I signed a lease for our apartment! It was quite a day driving around in the area looking for places to live, but we got a place and we love it! Before I post pictures, let me tell you more details...

Our ideal apartment would be a 1 bed/1 bath (with double sinks), a nice kitchen with lots of counter space, and a study. We want a decent desk space as I'll be in grad school and Matt will be starting his master's program in about a year, so obviously that was important. The double sink was my idea because I've always been spoiled with my own bathroom/sink (except on vacations and 2 years in the dorm).

After grad school/job stuff became official, we decided we wanted to live in a certain DFW suburb that is basically in between our two school/work locations (sorry, no name- creepy internet stalkers and all). We spent several hours looking at apartments and creating spreadsheets of specific complexes, their amenities, costs, making appointments to visit them for yesterday, etc. 

Long story short, it came down to two apartments. One of which I randomly turned into because it looked nice on the outside and I hadn't previously heard about it.


Apartment A:
-Very much in budget
-Had a separate study
-Good bathroom
-But- didn't get to tour the specific floorplan as it wasn't available yet
-And- it was built in the 1980s. We wanted something a bit newer for reliability
-It had no garages nor gated access


Apartment B [the one we randomly turned into]:
-No separate study
-One sink
-Private garage under unit & gated access
-Built within the past decade
-A bit on the upper end of the budget
-Very open floorplan, huge kitchen, etc
-Wrap around porch 
-NOT white paint
-Crown moldings


So, which one do you think we picked? Apartment B of course! (Read the side story at the end for more details) Without further ado, here are a few pictures. I'm sure you'll be seeing more post-move-in and we start to decorate.

As you enter, looking to your left

Living room/study area from the kitchen

Kitchen/dining/laundry room area

Kitchen. We have drawers! If you know where I live, you understand why this is a huge deal

Living room, with door for wrap-around porch

Big empty bedroom

And the exciting bathroom lol

Aww, what a cute couple :P

And there you have your first tour. You better believe I cannot wait to start thinking about furniture and decorating... so glad I'll have the summer off before grad school to do that!

Side story: we almost didn't get this apartment. As I said before, as we were driving to another apartment complex we saw this one, thought it looked nice, and turned in. This unit had been vacant for a little bit, but several people had expressed interest. After we toured it, we really liked it but had one more we wanted to see. The lady told us that there was another couple that wanted it, so if we wanted to guarantee it would be there for us if we decided we did want it, we needed to put down a refundable deposit.

Check written, we went to look at the other complex, went to lunch, and decided yes, we want the newer one. Once we got there, the other couple that wanted that unit had just gotten there and brought in their lease application for the unit!!!! Thankfully, since we had the deposit down, it was ours until we said anything else. They ended up getting another floorplan, and we got our apartment, so it all turned out well in the end. As the complex is really popular, that kind of thing happens a lot, according to the apartment lady, so I'm glad we were able to get it!