Sorry, guys, I know it's been a while since I last posted! I'd been sucked into the scary abyss of apartment hunting.
Seriously apartment hunting in New York is no joke, plus trying to find a decent sized space for a reasonable amount of money (not like $2500 for a studio!) is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Our studio apartment is starting to feel smaller and smaller by the day: Our cat is literally bouncing off the walls, and basically, we're tired of bumping into each other.
We are in need of a bigger place that's for sure. Or at least a place where the bedroom has a door. That's all we're asking for (cue in the sad violin music).
So the search began. We started casually looking in and around Brooklyn over the summer just to get a sense of what was out there. When people would tell me their apartment hunting horror stories a part of me would think that they have to be over exaggerating.
It took our first dip in the apartment hunting waters to realize, no, no they weren't exaggerating. When our first viewing led us to an address that was not of an actual residential building, but of a cinder block yard, we knew this was going to be a very interesting ride.
With some Brooklyn rents as high as high as some rents in Manhattan, we opened up our search to Queens....and even Jersey. It started out as fun where we could explore different neighborhoods and see different kinds of "living" spaces. But the fun quickly filtered out after we visited one crappy apartment after the next, sprinkled with one or two just ok apartments. Case and point, upon leaving one apartment, the front door knob literally fell into my hand, not to mention the entire building smelled of gasoline. Just no one light a match!
Every morning I would troll Craigslist, Street Easy, Naked Apartments, and various other realty websites. Refreshing each page constantly. Seeing listing titles such as "WOW, Super Sexy Clean LARGE 1 BR" (let's just put every appealing adjective in the title, shall we?), only to scroll down to the pics to reveal a super broke down extra small one bedroom with no window. But with that said, very surprisingly out of all of the sites, Craigslist was actually the one that came through in the end. And after all these months, after we almost gave up on Brooklyn...we finally found our place. As soon as we walked in we knew that this was it. The apartment.
So the lease is signed. We're moving to an ACTUAL one bedroom! And more importantly, we're staying in Brooklyn!
So the moral of this story is before going apartment hunting, especially in New York f!@#$% City, remember these three things: Patience, a sense of humor and the knowledge that good things come with time.