We might have found a place
Looked at an apartment in Highland Park yesterday. With heat, it's $150/month outside of my budget, BUT it offers a short-term lease, so if we don't have employment lined up for next fall by then, we can move out June 30 and live at the river for July/August (and therefore not have to pay rent), which more than counteracts the overage.
I emailed the company today to ask if they have anything a bit smaller (and closer to my budget), and we have a few more places to look at over the next few days, but if nothing stellar appears, this is likely to be it.
It's HUGE. Like, we could live there and have two or three roommates and still not feel cramped.
It's the top two floors of a really cool old house, two of the rooms are even part tower. :-)
The downside (aside from the expense) is that it's clearly meant to be a bunch of bedrooms - there's no "flow." First floor (of the apartment) has a huge kitchen, full bathroom, two smallish rooms and one big room. Second has full bathroom, two smallish rooms and one huge room that's divided into two parts. Since heat will be expensive, I think we might put our bedrooms on the lower floor and the living spaces on the upper floor, since heat rises, and I'd want the spaces in which we spend the bulk of our time to be warmer than our bedrooms.
There's enough space for us to have a living room (the big half of the huge room), play room (small half of the huge room), school room (one of the smaller rooms upstairs), and craft room (another smaller room). The boys want to continue to share a bedroom, so that STILL leaves us with one extra room. Kitchen is eat-in, so we might even start eating at a table.
I'm excited at the prospect of a "school" room in which I can hang posters/maps/etc and in which we can do school work at an actual table instead of on books/box tops on the floor.
Of course, we need to replace a bunch of our furniture that was destroyed in a rainstorm two years ago, so once we claim the place, Craigslist will be my friend. If anyone has furniture (particularly living-room furniture and/or a nice table and chairs) they'd like to donate to us, we'd be happy for it.
Look ahead to desperate pleas for a moving crew, as I cannot carry anything heavy up the steps, Danny's having surgery on October 17th and won't be able to help, and...well, that's pretty much it for my options of people strong enough to move my stuff. Fortunately, I don't have nearly as much stuff in general as I used to have, and we actually have very little, furniture-wise. My big concerns are getting the beds, dressers, and filing cabinet up the steps. Devin and I can move pretty much everything else ourselves, if we have to.
I emailed the company today to ask if they have anything a bit smaller (and closer to my budget), and we have a few more places to look at over the next few days, but if nothing stellar appears, this is likely to be it.
It's HUGE. Like, we could live there and have two or three roommates and still not feel cramped.
It's the top two floors of a really cool old house, two of the rooms are even part tower. :-)
The downside (aside from the expense) is that it's clearly meant to be a bunch of bedrooms - there's no "flow." First floor (of the apartment) has a huge kitchen, full bathroom, two smallish rooms and one big room. Second has full bathroom, two smallish rooms and one huge room that's divided into two parts. Since heat will be expensive, I think we might put our bedrooms on the lower floor and the living spaces on the upper floor, since heat rises, and I'd want the spaces in which we spend the bulk of our time to be warmer than our bedrooms.
There's enough space for us to have a living room (the big half of the huge room), play room (small half of the huge room), school room (one of the smaller rooms upstairs), and craft room (another smaller room). The boys want to continue to share a bedroom, so that STILL leaves us with one extra room. Kitchen is eat-in, so we might even start eating at a table.
I'm excited at the prospect of a "school" room in which I can hang posters/maps/etc and in which we can do school work at an actual table instead of on books/box tops on the floor.
Of course, we need to replace a bunch of our furniture that was destroyed in a rainstorm two years ago, so once we claim the place, Craigslist will be my friend. If anyone has furniture (particularly living-room furniture and/or a nice table and chairs) they'd like to donate to us, we'd be happy for it.
Look ahead to desperate pleas for a moving crew, as I cannot carry anything heavy up the steps, Danny's having surgery on October 17th and won't be able to help, and...well, that's pretty much it for my options of people strong enough to move my stuff. Fortunately, I don't have nearly as much stuff in general as I used to have, and we actually have very little, furniture-wise. My big concerns are getting the beds, dressers, and filing cabinet up the steps. Devin and I can move pretty much everything else ourselves, if we have to.