Finding a New Home

Note: This post was written in week 5 of our pregnancy. I am currently nearing week 13. We should be caught up and posting "real-time" in a couple weeks. We have lots to catch up on!

This past week has been wild. Aside from finding out we're pregnant(!!!), we also decided to start looking for a new place with more room to grow. We actually spent our Valentine's Day this year looking at apartments...not so romantic. In fact, it was completely overwhelming trying to find an affordable 2-bedroom condo/apartment/house in our price range. We looked all over Seattle, but kept feeling a tug to stay in West Seattle, so we started our search there. We downloaded all the rental apps (who knew!) we could find and obsessively scoured them trying to find something promising.

There was one that looked good, so we both left work early that day to go check it out. We had a feeling it was going to be the one. It was a huge, 2 bedrooms, 2 bath with a deck and a pretty large kitchen. Perfect! Our hopes were up. We got there and learned that the rent was more expensive than it said on the listing and that the owner of the condo decided to cut the lease back to 6 months. No way was this going to work.

We left feeling a bit deflated, but figured that since we were already out we should go drive up and down the main street in West Seattle to hunt for "For Rent" signs. Arthur wanted to look at another place a couple blocks from our current place that he had found on one of the rental apps first, so we called the landlord to take a look. When we got there I didn't have a great feeling. There were lots of stairs and all I could wonder was how I was going to get a stroller up and down those every day, even though we didn't know we were pregnant yet. It was all uphill (bad) from there. The landlord was really intense and the place just didn't feel right. He also didn't like that we had a cat and told us we should consider putting her in the storage unit downstairs to live...ummm, no. I told Arthur that I didn't think it was the right place and that we should move on, but if he really was interested that he could move forward with it. We left not really sure where anyone stood. But I was pretty sure the place was a "no-way" for me.

We went on with our night figuring that we would tell the guy no when he called back the next day. We did and figured that was the end of it. However, after work that night (positive pregnancy test day!) we came home and began the (overwhelmingly obsessive feeling) task of continuing to apartment hunt. Maybe it was my new perspective on life with a baby cooking inside of me, but something made me start second guessing that place. I started to think about all the good qualities.

I was thinking about the huge kitchen and how much counter space there is to cook and put big jars of flour and sugar out. I thought about the sun streaming in at 5pm through the little kitchen window. I thought about playing games around the big island and people being able to sit with me while I’m cooking—maybe even help out while I’m at the stove. Cuddling on the couch with just the kitchen drop light dimly lit watching TV. Giving the baby a bath in the little tub at night. And all the ways we would be living our new life. I shuffled our furniture around and around in my head picturing where everything would go. It was becoming more intriguing to me and maybe it would work. I asked Arthur to call him back. He did and asked if we could come back again to take some measurements.

So we went back to the apartment Thursday night, but I had already decided we would go for it. We told the landlord we were interested, and he said he needed the weekend to think it over. At this point I didn't know what I was going to do if we didn't get the place. I was so set on it and nervous he wasn't going to choose us, because apparently there were other people in line behind us, and those people probably didn't have cats.

That's the almost finished Trader Joe's on the right (yellow/tan and white building)! Can't wait!!

He finally called us back late Monday evening to tell us we got the place, but we had to start paying March 10th. We don't need to be out of our current place until the end of March, which is a bit of a bummer, but we felt it was the right place so we are going for it. We are planning the official move for March 17, which gives me about 3 weeks to pack and get things in order. I can also use the gym until the end of the month, when hopefully the weather will start to get nicer.

While I'm incredibly excited, I'm also incredibly overwhelmed. There is so much going on and I definitely feel a bit overstimulated. I found some encouragement in this Babble post by Emily about her cross-country move at 17 weeks—hardly the 4 block move at 9 weeks I will be doing. If she can do that, I can surely move down the street. Right? It's hard to get too overwhelmed though with all the blessing we are receiving from our Father. When He blesses us, I find he REALLY blesses us. I have been meditating on how lovely this is—that God loves to surprise us in big ways and knows our hearts desires so intimately. This is a crazy beautiful season we're in right now and I desperately hope to savor it all slowly.

Need to catch up?

Pregnancy Posts:

We're Having a Baby!

How We Found Out

Anxiety and Early Pregnancy

Weekly Updates:

Pregnancy: Week 5