home sweet new home

Per request, I'll tell you about my new place. I was mentally composing a post while I was driving back from Virginia on Thursday, but that post obviously never made it to the web. This will have to do instead.

Anyone who has ever searched for a new home in an unfamiliar place can tell you that it's exciting and discouraging at the same time. It's exciting because there's always the hope that you'll discover "the place" that has everything you'd been hoping to find in your new home, but it's equally discouraging because most places that you look at don't even come close to the place you've imagined for yourself & most of them are over-priced, not as clean as you'd like them to be, and/or in a quasi-ghetto neighborhood. Because of this, determination and time are key ingredients to finding a new home.

After looking at multiple apartments & townhouses that had more of the characteristics that make home hunting discouraging than anything else, I was beginning to consider the possibility of settling for a short-term lease in a less-than-desirable townhouse to give myself more time to find "the place." But then, I found it.

It is an apartment rather than a townhouse like I was hoping to find, but I'm totally OK with that. It's in a nice residential neighborhood where lots of doctors & lawyers & police officers live. The apartment complex is actually rated the safest apartment complex in Harrisonburg by the local police, which isn't too surprising considering that most of the tenants are professionals & JMU professors & cute, little 80-year-old ladies who bake brownies for their neighbors. And the rent is less than the rent would be at any of the other places I looked at & way more energy efficient.

The apartment itself is a 2nd story apartment, but it's neat because it has a 1st floor entrance. The way the building is set up, all the entrances are on the 1st floor. So you would enter the apartment on the ground level, where there's a coat closet & an interior, private staircase that leads up to the apartment itself. It's a 2 bedroom, 1 bath apartment with good-sized closets and a washer & dryer in-unit. Yay, no more need for quarters just to do my laundry. The kitchen's a little small, but the huge pantry makes up for the lack of kitchen space.

So that's my new place. I don't have any pictures for you at the moment, & for those of you who didn't know, I'm still in Bloomington for the next week & a half or so. If any of you feel like using up some of your cell phone minutes in the next couple weeks, I have plenty of free time from now until I move. The move-in date is still TBA, but once I have that finalized, I'll e-mail out my new contact information.