Home is Where The Heart is?

I feel like I have blogged or facebooked about this topic before.  Apparently I (and Jarrod) are not very good at selecting apartments.  When we realized we were moving to Houston we decided it was best to have a semi permanent place to land.  We didn't want to explode all of our stuff at Jarrod's uncle's house and so we enlisted the help of Jarrod's cousin to check out places for us while we were still finishing up in Maine.  We found the apartments on craigslist ourselves and asked her to check them out.  Out of the 2 she looked at, she said this one was the best since the other one had a "home made AC unit". We agreed and were so happy to find something that appeared to all of us as a good place and so we contacted them and put down a deposit.  We had a place to land, it was 2 bedrooms and it was in an area we thought would be great...

It's amazing the situations that make you realize it's time to grow up.  One would think getting married would help with that realization, but honestly it was more excitement and fun, than maturity enhancing.  But living in an apartment that makes me dread coming home, has made me realize that sometime it does not make sense to save.  Sometimes the money you put in, really equals the quality you get out.

We are definitely getting what we pay for here in our current apartment.  I would dare argue that we are actually paying too much.  Though I am not going to list the various areas of frustration with our current place (this is the internet, this is a public blog and I don't want to hurt our chance of leaving...) I will say that the only good thing that has come from this apartment is the realization that it is indeed time to grow up and part of growing up is not jumping into decisions.  That part of growing up is parting with the hard yearned money we make to ensure that their is a happy, healthy environment to come HOME to.

I will say that luckily enough our landlords have agreed to release us from our current lease if we can find someone else to take it.  Unfortunately there is not much we can do to make that happen.  We do not know many people here in Houston (at least not people looking for an apartment) and craigslist has become so secure that they will not allow us to post our own apartment because our post appears too similar to the one we responded to 2 months ago. We can not hang a "For Rent" sign on the complex gate and if we use a finder site, we have to pay an extra month's rent to leave.  So in reality, our landlords are being helpful because they know it will be impossible.

You live, you learn, you grow up.  Hopefully Jarrod and I will grow from this decision and we will find ways to ignore the physical home we are stuck with for the time being and realize that our home is in our puppy's panting tongue, or in our cat's whine.  Home is going for a 3 mile walk only to return and realize your keys are at the park you just left and having to do those 3 miles again.  Home is planning for the future and realizing it's ok to say you've made a bad decision and you're happy you can learn from it. Growing up is not always easy to do.... Maybe we'll do it eventually :)