Want to Carry Some Boxes?

It's official. Yesterday I signed the lease to a place in the Minneapolis area to move to! I'll be living with two friends--Karl and Jared--in a 2 and a half story house in St. Louis Park, which is a little south and west of downtown Minneapolis. It feels good to have a place decided upon, even though it now means I have to pack and move, which won't be fun, especially considering the weekend I am moving in is the weekend of the auction for my great uncle's estate.

With the auction on the same weekend I'm going to have to move, my packing and moving will be done predominantly by myself and anyone I can trick into helping since my family will be busy with the estate sale. I'm sure it'll be fine, but moving my gigantic TV, couches, bed, and dressers will be a little bit of a chore. If anything I suppose I can just leave them home for a week or so until my family can help me move it all if no one else is available.

The place that we are moving to is not big, but it's also not dirty. Since I've never had to search for a place to live before, it was an eye opening experience to see just how crappy some places could be and how misleading pictures in ads really are. One place we stopped by, we had high hopes for because it was in a good neighborhood, was well over 2,000 square feet in size, and was close to downtown.

We drove by the place and the outside looked fine. The pictures in the ad made it look really slick and clean inside. The lady I talked to seemed nice. All signs pointed to the place being great. It wasn't . We got there and as soon as we got inside I wondered if it was the same place from the ad. The entire interior looked like it hadn't had any upkeep done to it since before Regan was president.

When we went to look at the basement we found it to be completely unfinished--just cement walls, a moldy smell, and a washer/dryer were to be found there. The upper floor was the only decent part of the place and that was no doubt because it was one big master bedroom that I'm sure whoever had been living there was very respectful of, and who liked to live cleanly.

The kitchen was also a mess and just felt... gross. The entire house needed to be bleached from top to bottom before it would be livable. So we mulled it over, but knew it wouldn't work, even though it was unbelievably spacious.

The last place we visited for the day was actually the place we ended up taking. It was owned by a couple who were in their late 20's or early 30's who were moving to Iowa. You could tell they had really taken care of the place. I mean, heck, it was actually CLEAN! That was the biggest selling point for us. No part of the house felt gnarly, icky, or gross. It felt like somewhere we all wanted to live.

It's not the biggest place, like I said before, but it is in a great neighborhood, feels homely, is an actual house (which should make it easier to feel like we're in a home as opposed to someone else's home or a temporary living area), and is actually a rent-to-own place if I would want to take the route of purchasing the house as time goes on.

It's not a place I could see myself raising a family in because it is small, but it might be a good place to start off for a few years and save some money while gaining equity. I just have to be careful right now as the housing boom is on the way down and if I bought a place I wouldn't want to end up losing value. But at least the purchase option is on the table if I want to exercise it.

So, anyways, I didn't take any pictures of the place, but I did grab a couple from the listing before they took it down. These pictures don't lie and the place looks as nice as they make it seem. I'll try to get some good pictures put up in a month when I move in.