A Two Bedroom Townhouse Apartment of My Own

We've been seriously considering the cardboard box option for housing in Ohio, with Avram getting a deep freezer box, me getting a refrigerator box, Lydia with a dishwasher box, and poor Elisheva just qualifying for a microwave box, since she's only three months old. Cardboard does have its own panache, stick-it-to-the-man sort of independence and disregard for either societal expectations for housing that has indoor plumbing, electricity and (here's the real kicker) that you can stand up in, or disregard for climate wear, like walls that don't get soggy when it rains, or snows, or from the humidity in the air. However, I think that in the long run, although we'll have to pay rent, moving into an apartment is the better choice for us.

The problem isn't rental amounts; we're in the Midwest "fly-over" part of the world, and so that thankfully is the most positive part of home-hunting, No, it's the being in a different state than the apartments you're looking at, and not knowing whether what looks good on monitor is that snazzy in real life. Although I've called countless apartment complexes and played 20 questions with them about their apartments, so I'm as informed as you can be, without physically being there.

I'm just not as lucky-go-happy in home living than I used to be - I actually have standards about where I want to live. In college in my single days, I lived in some real economy housing to save money. I lived in one apartment complex where the bathroom was directly over the kitchen table, and in most of the apartments the toilet had leaked through the ceiling. Lovely. Or another place I lived, called the Homely Cottage, which had a landlord who was about 200 years old, and a very nice man. Except his hobby was puttering around our house, and so he was over there most days doing something or another to "improve" the home. Including the day that I broke up with my fiance, and I was drowning my sorrows with my friend Michele by watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and after it was over we were so tired we fell asleep in the living room on one of the couches, although not the nine feet long gold one, and he kept on coming through the living room and half waking us up, and I felt like my privacy was a little violated.

Or another house, where there were ten girls, and I lived in a converted family room with two other girls, and our room didn't have proper windows, being in the basement, but rather small skimpy ones at the top of the wall that were actually underground, and covered by a grill, and I felt like I was in quarantine with leprosy and held away from the world and light.

Or my other basement apartment, with a closet for a kitchen. You could only fit two people uncomfortably into it.

Yes, so let's not dwell on my seeming inability to pick out nice digs. Besides, all the ghetto ones provide better stories anyway. I think that my luck has finally turned, because after hours and days of extensive searching on the interwebs, I have found The Place.

It's called Meadowbrook Manor, and is townhouse style apartments six miles from Avram's building at OSU. Yeah, so it's a jaunt, but OSU is right downtown, and so all the housing right around it is either way to expensive or way too undesirable. Avram's going to ride his bike to it, so he'll have lots of good muscles and endurance and things. Most importantly, it's cute, well kept, has Washer and Dryer connections (hallelujah!) 980 square feet, a move up of a whole 320 square feet from Wymount (rest in peace my first beloved married apartment), lots of green areas and mature trees, air conditioning (which will also be a first for anywhere I've lived since marriage), and is a good price. (Plus it's north of campus, which is supposed to be better than South of campus).

I called, and grilled the manager on all sorts of questions about the apartments, and she was very informative and nice, and I asked for an application, and one is on its way. Now we just have to pass the credit, employment, and housing history that seem to be standard with apartment renting now-a-days (read, first time I've had that in my live, having only ever rented in the sub-standard BYU housing market, where they don't seem to care about anything but your rent checks).

Of course, I'm not looking forward to filling that out, with questions like where we've lived in the last two years, which has three moves, twice living with his parents for free (we sound like we're going nowhere fast, but it was transitional housing) and once in England. But with my awesome credit score, and Avram's steady employment (well, fellowship), I'm sure we'll make it through into our new housing, which we will love forever, or at least for the next couple of years.