Exciting, Excellent News

I don't want to leave that rant at the top for very long at all, so I decided to follow it basically immediately with some awesome news that counteracts the unpleasantries of the previous one.

For quite some time now, over a year really, we've been in the market for a new apartment.  At the time we started looking around, we had lived here for a year, and our contract had run its course, so we were renting month-to-month.  We wanted to move somewhere a little bigger, but we also wanted to move somewhere we really liked, a place that had all the things we were looking for now that we're both working and feeling much more financially stable, somewhere we could live for a good few years and that would really feel more like home (preferably somewhere just a little farther from Student Town...  We've really liked this area and ward, but there's so much turnover due to the number of students and proximity to campus).  We looked and looked, and never really found anything, and then I was called to be the choir director and Julie was called to work in the nursery, and we did like our apartment a lot, and it was a good deal, and there wasn't nearly the sense of urgency that there was the last time we moved (from a place we couldn't even stand living for six months), so we thought we might as well just keep our eyes open and stay at our current place to save a little money until we found the exact right new place, which apparently I have mentioned here on the blog before.

Flash forward about a year.  I had by this time started actually working from home, commandeering the dining room table (while we have been relegated to eating dinner in the living room), so we thought it was time to start looking again for a place with another bedroom I could use as an office (and, in the future, as a place for a wee one to spend its nights, as it were).  We had done a little apartment hunting here and there throughout the year, taking a few months at a time off, but always checking the listings to see if Our Place ever appeared.  We looked at so many apartments that we started to recognize a handful of really common layouts and amenities, and we found quite a few places we were sure we would have been mostly satisfied with, but we never left a place saying YES.  We thought after a while we were being a little too picky, but then we thought, if we're going to make a move and make it last for several years (maybe our last place before finding a house?), and since our current contract allowed for it, we might as well wait until we can find the place we want!  Still, we adjusted some of our requirements and tried to be a little more flexible.

Then, just as it was starting to look more or less hopeless, and with the unpleasant prospect of another sweltering summer in this oven (especially with me baking in it all the livelong workday), Julie casually mentioned an ad she found on Craigslist.  I was hesitant when they didn't include any pictures (tip:  When you are trying to rent your apartment, POST PICTURES.  Seriously, they really make or break your ad so very much of the time), but I called and made an appointment to swing by anyway, just to take a look.  Through some unfortunate circumstances I actually missed meeting the tenants (because I was looking at another place) and couldn't find the right apartment (I had the number wrong), but I looked at the place from the outside, and was pretty much thinking that we had to see the inside as soon as humanly possible.  I wrote a few emails and made a few calls and after work we had a chance to swing by on our way up to Park City for the weekend.  We walked in, looked around, talked to the wife of the house and her adorable child, and walked out saying YES.  By the next day we had been contacted by the landlady and two days later we had signed a contract (we even scored a discount on rent for signing for two years).  Apparently we were the first to look at it, so they took the ad down right away.  This place has pretty much everything we were hoping for!  It's probably twice as big as where we live now, and IT HAS AC.  The amenities are delightful, but I'll save them for a later post.  For now, this is just breaking the great news.  I actually don't have a picture (like I said, they didn't post any...), but I yoinked this one from Google Maps.  It's the gray one, second one from the left:

I'm trying to convince myself that it's not actually smaller than the apartment surrounding it, it's just sort of sunken in so it looks a little smaller from this angle.

We're moving!  Next week!  XD  And now when family come to visit we will have a place for them to sleep and they won't die of sweating in the night!  And, of course, neither will we.  And I can have my work in a separate place and close the door on it after the workday is done!  We had hoped to move outside of Provo, but this place is just so right that it's worth the possibility that there are still a lot of students around (not that we dislike students, it's just that we both finished school years ago, and that kind of area seems so transitory and impermanent).  It's actually really close to where we live now, like half a mile, but it is a little further from the central radius of campus, and in a little more established neighborhood with seemingly less student-type apartments.  It seems like each time you cross one of these major Provo streets it makes a big difference.  We've basically go about a mile northwest each time we move.  I contacted our current landlord and let them know we're on our way out, as I know our contract requires notice of 30 days, and they told us we would be responsible for rent for May, unless we found someone to take over for that month.  I posted an ad online (with plenty of pictures!) and that very night we had a young engaged couple come look at it, and just a few days later THEY had applied and were approved.  This really has been a good place, and it's a great deal, so I felt bad telling the other interested parties that the place had been sold, but mostly I was just glad there was so much interest, it made my job a lot easier.  That weekend in Park City we could think and talk of little else but how excited we were.

Patience and persistence and perserverance and prayer.  Those are the four Ps that made this possible.  And I guess that's a fifth P.

So yes!  That's it!  Great news!  Details to follow!  Very shortly!