When we moved in to our last apartment, we knew the building was for sale, but we needed a place to settle down fast, and the price was reasonable – even if the condition of the place left something to be desired. We had more or less decided that even when the place sold, we wouldn’t have to worry, since nobody would want to live in our unit.
However, last month, while my brother and sister-in-law were visiting, we got a note slipped under the door (the landlady wanted to talk to us in person, but we were out gallivanting). They had a buyer for the house, and they wanted to live downstairs. We had 30 days.
We decided that we didn’t want to use it all, so we started hunting immediately, and found a nice place. While it’s no longer easy walking distance to the girls’ school(s as of next year), with less than a week left, that’s not a major issue. All the windows are custom double-paned ones that stay up when you put them up, all the light sockets are filled with CFLs, the appliances are less than 2 years old, the light switches are in reasonable locations (and they all have switchplates), the bare-wood floors are, if not hardwood, at least varnished, the previous tenants did not practice knife-throwing at the doors… well, you get the idea. And, with the included heat, it’s really not much more expensive than the current place — come winter, it may well be less.
If you’re on my flickr friends list, you can see before shots in my photo stream: as we settle in, I’ll be posting more-representative ones. (I’m rather annoyed at myself: once we got the old place cleaned up, I wanted to get pictures, since I had never wanted to show the place off as it was. Each of the last couple of visits, though, the camera was at the new place.)