New Apartment

I've lived in my current apartment for two years now, which is longer than I've ever lived at any place other than my childhood home. It's a nice place; it burned down a few years ago so by the time I moved in, it had been completely rebuilt. It's modern and clean (sort of - nothing is ever really clean with two cats). There are a couple of problems with it, though.

First, the apartment is on a very busy street next to a rotary. People in Vermont don't know how to use rotaries and this rotary is pretty unusual, hence the large number of accidents that happen right in front of our place. People honk early in the morning and late at night. In the summer, we can't sleep with our windows open because the traffic noise wakes us up and drowns out the sound of the television.

Our landlord has been pretty decent, but he's in no hurry to get things fixed when the break or to plow when a foot of snow has fallen. Our lawn (a tiny tiny patch of grass) was just mowed for the first time this spring and the landscaping has been neglected for years.

Our apartment is a 25- to 30-minute walk from the university. This wouldn't be a big deal, but J and I don't have a car and the only bus that went directly to the university from near our house is being cancelled this month, so we don't have any quick way to get to and from in the winter. I don't mind long walks - I do them often - but when biology lab gets out at 9:00 pm on a Monday night it's just nice to not have to trudge two miles in the snow and ice to get home.

Anyway, we've been on the hunt for a new place and yesterday, we put a security deposit down on an apartment! It's a 10-15-minute walk from the apartment to my office and a stone's throw from the apartment to the university gym. It's also got a much more open floor plan than the apartment we're in now:

Old Apartment:









New Apartment:












The apartment we're in now is 1/3 hallway, and while the rooms are pretty private, it feels a bit cramped.

I have to admit that part of me is wondering if the new place is going to turn out to be a good thing. It's really charming, but it's not as modern as the place we're in now. The bedrooms are a bit smaller (I think - it's hard to tell), as are the kitchen and bathroom. The living room, though, is quite a bit larger. There's no porch, but there is a decent little strip of lawn to hang out on. There's also a storage unit in the basement.

If it's as quiet as I'm hoping, I think the location of the new apartment will make the move totally worth it. I'm excited about being able to keep my windows open at night, waking up the the sound of birds, and falling asleep to the sound of crickets.

The only thing that makes me sad to leave our current building is that I have a lot of memories tied to it - my first year with J, little memories of Echo sleeping on the couch and racing through the hallway.