We got a place!!!

With our contract signing date looming and after a couple of fairly stressful weeks scouring the Internet for apartments and units, we FINALLY found something that was big enough, didn't reek of smoke, was clean and best of all was in an ideal location. The rental market in general is pretty competitive, but in the Northern Suburbs seems to be extremely tight. Every 'open for inspection' that we attended had one of the aforementioned "issues" that were unacceptable to us and were also being visited by at least 4 or 5 interested parties. We were even 'saved' from renting what we thought was another 'ideal' unit by a good Samaritan who warned us that the lady living next door was more than one sandwich shy of a picnic, if you know what I mean. The unit was situated close to our son's school, shops and the train station and about 1k (or 3/4 of a mile for the U.S. folks following this) from our current house. She came and told us of the problems that previous tenants had with this person and that several people in other units either had restraining orders against her or had broken their leases and left due to her behavior. That was enough to deter us and now that we have found something just as ideal (if not more so), we'll be delivering her a bottle of wine! She felt she had to tell us because she saw us show up with our children and just couldn't bare it if we weren't warned. Thank goodness for kind hearted people with good intentions!

So here are a couple of shots of the new little unit that we'll be renting. It's (get this) across the street from our sons school, is 1 block from the shops, grocery market, etc. and only about a 10 minute walk to the train station and is about .80k (that would be about 1/2 a mile) from our current house. It's also a 3 bedroom (great for us as we have 2 'energetic' boys) with each room being quite large and a decent size living room. Rather than the 2 bedroom units we were considering, it's almost like moving to a smaller version of our current house which is great. Our house now is probably medium to small in size, so not too much consolidation needed. We'll only be bringing the basics and storing a lot of items, but it's only temporary and will make moving into the new, larger and fully equipped house that much more exciting! Our contract signing is on the 30th of April and we move in on the 1st of May, which makes the timing excellent. We have targeted our demolition to begin May 7th (pending us being out by then and all necessary utilities being disconnected, and will keep you posted as to how we run, but with securing this little place, we are now looking to be right on schedule (at least from our end)!