The story of the past few months

Can't believe I haven't posted about this yet.

I suppose I should start from the beginning, which comes before the whole apartment thing. I decided a few months ago that I want to go to culinary school, so I started to do some research and before I knew it I was accepted into Texas Culinary Academy in Austin, TX. It seemed like an awesome opportunity for both Corbin and me, so we took a trip to Austin to visit the city and see the school. The week before we went, though, I discovered that the school was not quite what I wanted it to be. I'd also heard from a lot of people in the culinary industry that culinary school is not as important as kitchen experience, so I decided not to go to the school but we went to visit Austin anyway.

We had a good time in Austin-- SXSW was going on so the place was packed and there were bands playing in every bar. This was pretty cool, but also not really what we wanted. We made the most of our weekend but came back feeling like Austin wasn't quite the right place for us. In fact, our time in Austin actually made us more excited about Richmond. So we decided when we got back that we would stay in Richmond a little while longer.

In March I became the new manager of Aromas Coffee Bar, where I'd been working since September. The more I learned about the position, the more valuable I realized it was for me because the owners essentially treat me like I'm the owner. So upon deciding to stay in Richmond, I decided that I wanted to stay at Aromas longer (I'd planned to leave June 1, having been the manager at the time for 3 months). So the game plan became that we would move into a new apartment - preferably larger, but more importantly with a larger kitchen - so that I could dedicate more time to teaching myself how to cook through cookbooks, cooking classes, and eventually a second or full-time job in a kitchen.

So began the apartment hunting process, but in no hurry. I drove around the fan, combing the streets for "For Rent" signs, and I hit Craig's List hard, mostly disappointed with what I found. Then last week I got a call from my sister, who told me that the apartment across the hall from her would be opening up. It's a one bedroom apartment on the second floor of a house in the fan and it shares the floor with one other apartment (my sister's). The owner of the house lives in the basement and her parents live on the first floor. They are friends of my parents'.

At first it seemed that the apartment would be too expensive, but we wanted to see it anyway so that we could get an idea of what we can get for what kind of money. Turns out the landlord agreed that we could pay the previous tenant's rent price, but she would raise it $35 for anyone else. In addition, the rent included water/sewer, heat, cable & internet. What we would pay for is electricity and gas. Um, wow. So then we saw the apartment, and it was awesome. Big. With a kitchen twice the size of ours now. Built-in shelves in the living room. Lots of windows and light. Gas cooking. Gas cooking! And located exactly where we wanted to be.

So we learned that we had first dibs if we wanted it, but that the owner had gotten a lot of calls about it so we basically had about 24 hours to decide. We went back and forth, mostly trying to decide if we could afford it. We decided we could, and that it was actually an AWESOME deal (apartments like this in the fan are usually in the $1200/month region and we're paying several hundreds less than that).

Move in is approximately June 1 and YAY!! New apartment!!