Onward - A new place to live

There isn't a bumpdate today because we spent the entire weekend packing and moving out of our little one bedroom apartment. It was an emotional weekend (preggo hormones mixed with exhaustion) but we made it. The bumpdate will be postponed until I can get to doing the chalkboard. Hopefully it will be up on Wednesday. Why are we moving? Rent.....it's outrageous in L.A. With the economy increasing, so are the rent prices and honestly we cannot afford to keep living with the extravagant prices, especially with a baby on the way. So we packed up our apartment into a 10x15 storage unit and moved in with my in-laws to start sacking away some money for a house. It's a sacrifice that we decided would be worth it in the long run for our growing family. Is it an ideal situation? Of course not. Will we make the best out of the situation. Definitely. I say that this move was emotional on many levels. We have grown so much as a couple living in this apartment, and I have grown leaps and bounds as a person as well. This apartment has seen a lot of sadness, from the loss of my father; to our ectopic pregnancy. We had the thunderstorm incident here as well. It also witnessed our greatest joy, finally becoming pregnant with our first child. We have grown closer and have fallen even more in love here. It has by far been my most favorite place we have lived. Not because of the location, or the actual complex itself. It was the layout, our neighbors and just the feeling that we had there.

I figured I would give you a little peak into our world. People say to me all the time, "Your a designer? You probably have a beautiful home!" Well as we all know, creating a beautiful home costs money. And being a designer causes me to have expensive taste. So while I think our home is comfy and cozy, its really full of hand-me-downs mixed in with a couple of pieces that we have purchased ourselves. A lot of these photo's are from when we first moved in, so the don't include our new to us recliners or our new comforter that I made (post to come) but you can see how we spent the majority of our three years living in this apartment.

Here's our main living space. We no longer have those wing chairs or that gigantic projection tv, we added curtains to the windows after our first heat blasting summer as well. We love our storage chests and I love our hand-me-down sofa as well (regardless of how ugly it is underneath that slipcover!)

Our dining room is something that was new to our old apartment. I love our countertop table with chairs cause Miss Shelby cannot get her head on it! We had a little mini bar set up and a wine rack also. That photo of the tree with the sunset was taken by my great hubby and I blew it up and framed it for him. You can see it larger here.

Our apartment kitchen....complete with a martini theme.....although most of the time it was just a mess! It's a kitchen!

Our bedroom that doubled as an office. This is where the blog posts were composed....it was also the dumping ground for when people came over. The bookcase got moved into our closet last year and we bought another dresser from Ikea. You can really see my love for teal and grey in our bedding. Baby girl is probably going to have a teal, pink and grey nursery.....that's how much I love it!

Here's our balcony. It was perfect to eat dinner or have a cocktail after work on hot summer days and it overlooked the pool and a wonderful piece of grass. The hubby always bbq'd out here as well.

There you have it....a look into our home for the last three years. Bittersweet, but in the end it will be worth it! Happy St. Patties Day!!

The Joys of Apartment Living

We all dream to one day grow up, have a family and live in a big beautiful house with a white picket fence and a dog. Well at least that is my dream. For the last 4 years it has seemed to just be a fantasy. Why? I live in Southern California. The real estate market took a dump in 2008 and when it was supposed to be "the best time for us to buy a home" all we found were foreclosures that had ZERO potential to be anything but a complete loss for the bank. Every year my husband and I make the trek out around our area to see what's available in our budget. Let me tell you, we have a decent budget.....for every other state in our country with the exception of New York! Our first year out we saw upwards of 30 condos and town-homes all in the upper $200k price range and they were all garbage. We went into one foreclosure that literally had no kitchen. The residents took out all the cabinetry, sinks, appliances, they took the pedestal sink and the toilet out too! Oh but they left the dryer in the garage. (yea thanks buddy just what I wanted a broken dryer that I will have to pay someone to take away!) Darin visited a foreclosure that had a foot of water in the kitchen! WHAT? The banks were asking $275-290K for these properties! It seemed like a loss so we decided to just stay where we were. Our one bedroom apartment, with our pup.

We have been content in our apartment for the last 2 years. It's close to necessary conveniences like shopping and entertainment, pet friendly, relatively cheap (comparatively) and is a nice layout. Year three things took another turn. We had just decided that we were gonna stay, when out of no where some moron decides to have a party in our community center, has a fire in the fireplace but whoops they forgot to open the flue and up in flames it went. There went a lot of the amenities that we pay for, including our gym. Then they decided to INCREASE our rent! Um hello? We are loyal residents and we are staying here despite losing vital amenities and your gonna screw us We didn't have anywhere else to go, so we had no choice. (By the way this happened in February of 2010, its now the middle of Jan 2011 and the new clubhouse still isn't finished) Not only were we without clubhouse, but due to construction they had to close one of our 2 pools. When summer hit that was a nightmare. You got all the kids, plus the underage drinkers, and the elderly people all at one pool. They decided to send out a letter that each apartment was only allowed to have 2 guests attend the pool! WHAT?!?! The lease that I signed said nothing about people restrictions to use my amenities.

Not only this, but over the course of the summer we had some issues with our kitchen sink. It kept overflowing. We woke up on our anniversary to a gray water nightmare. Overflowed onto our counter and our apartment SMELLED! When I called the leasing office they told me that it wasn't an emergency and they would send someone as soon as they could. How is this filth not an emergency? It's a health hazard. Two and a half hours later someone showed up to snake the drain. YAY. "Happy Anniversary honey! Gift? Well I got you this nasty smell and a wait! How thoughtful!" 2 weeks later it happened again! This time it left an inch of water on our kitchen floor! Needless to say I left a not so nice message on the answering machine at the leasing office, because they were of course closed when I got home. Not only problems with the sink, but our dryer...oh it's a peach. It takes 3 hours to dry a load of towels. 3 HOURS! Jeans forget it. Not to mention the time our water heater broke and another time where a repair guy drilled a hole into our gas line!

Not only do we have issues with the physical things in our apartment, we have such wonderful neighbors. (Insert sarcasm here!) We have one neighbor who constantly bangs on his wall and his barking dag drives us nuts. Another has a child that seems to have an illness, she cannot leave their apartment without screaming at the top of her lungs while running to the staircase. They also let her knock on our door and run away, which in turn aggravates our dog. The people below us smoke cigarettes and have these little yappie dogs, so if we aren't having our noses invaded by the nasty smell its our ears drums being assaulted. The newest one however is the BEST. I don't know if they don't know they have neighbors below or if they don't care, but at all hours of the night you can hear them walking (no jumping) around the apartment, slamming doors, dropping what sounds like 25 pound dumb-bells and various other noises. It's enough to drive a person MAD!

Needless to say the time has come for us to move on and up and purchase a house. The hunt has begun. We have already seen three prospects in our price range with decent living conditions. I mean a GREAT step up from the missing cabinets and flooding. The process will be long, but I am sure that with enough faith and searching that we WILL find the home of our dreams!