Apartment adventures

We have officially moved out of our house.  The house closing happened yesterday.  Last week we moved into our home for the next 4 months or so.  We've moved from 24 acres to an apartment building.  I don't know if I should feel more sorry for us or the people around us!  It's been a bit of an adjustment.  It is just down the road from where we are building our house so the girls will be in the same schools and hopefully the same bus.  It has three bedrooms so Sierra and Laurel are getting used to sharing a room again.  The living/dining/study room is large enough to accommodate our main furnishings.  We have a large storage unit in town that is packed to the brim.  Unfortunately Cadence's extra car seat, her new bike, and our car bike rack are somewhere in the depths of the unit.

 Our new kitchen is small.  I can touch every major appliance as I stand in one spot.  It has one drawer.  One.  Drawer.  Those two drawers on the right... they're fake.  That almost made me cry.  You may not have seen our old kitchen.

New kitchen

 

Old kitchen

 

Do you see the problem?  Four months, four months, four months. That is my mantra!  I did discover that the dishwasher seconds as a good storage area (as long as you don't mind washing everything by hand).

 

While the downstairs is roomy (except for the kitchen) the biggest downer is the fact that the place has five windows.  For the whole apartment.  There's a whole lotta artificial light going on.  The girls' rooms have no windows.  Do you know how hard it is to wake up tired kids when they sleep in a cave?!  If you can't tell from our old house, we like sunlight.  Lots of it.  Four months, four months, four months.

Old living room

 

 

New living/dining/study room

 

For some reason this large, multi-level apartment is only accessible with a key fob and has no system to buzz people in to the building.  So begins our first adventure.  Our second night in the apartment I couldn't find my car keys.  Brad was leaving for work before 6am and I couldn't be carless the next day so I drove to our old house to get my spare set of keys.  I returned to the apartment around 11:45pm when Shiloh promptly pooped on the carpet.  Awesome.  I hurried up to take her outside.  Once outside (where, of course, she didn't do anything) I realized that I didn't have a key fab.  There was no way for me to get into the building.  Even if I did have my phone I couldn't call because Brad's phone was downstairs and he would never hear it as he slept upstairs.  I was resigned to wait until someone else came home to take pity on me and let me in.  I was annoyed until I remembered... I had turned the bath water on before I took Shiloh outside.  I think every curse word came out of my mouth as I envisioned the entire building flooding as my family slept through the whole thing and I stood outside helpless!  I started walking around the building hoping to see a light on where I could yell up to some random stranger (there are only shops on the first level, homes start on second floor) and hope that they would come downstairs at midnight to let me back inside.  I was panicked!  As I passed the door that I had originally come in when I got home I tried to open it.  It felt like divine intervention as it opened!  It hadn't latched when I walked in.  Thank you Lord!  I bolted upstairs to find the tub filled to the top but not overflowing!  Despite how stressful it was, I know it could have turned out disastrously and somehow I got lucky.  I hope this luck continues to follow us throughout this journey to our new home.  On the upside, this is the view from our balcony!