Here We Go Again: New Job, Move, and Another Apartment Hunt

We are welcoming here our newest blogger, Audra, and look forward to her tales about apartment living in a small Southern city.

Hello there. I’m Audra and my story of apartment living started almost a year ago. On a gorgeous day in May of last year, I found myself dressed in a cap and gown at my university’s commencement. It’s an understatement to say that everything happened too fast. I barely realized that I was going to start living in the “real world” — that meant finding another job, paying bills for things like doctor visits, and finding a place to live for myself and my boyfriend  in Macon, Georgia.  After days of scouring the internet for a place to live, I found the perfect apartment to call home; complete with hardwood floors, French doors, ample windows, and a great community.

But a year has passed by, and life has thrown new changes our way — this time an email with a great job offer for my boyfriend in another city changed everything. Our great apartment had to go and I began the apartment search again. As a creature of habit, I went back to Craigslist, hotpads.com, and sketchy Google postings, trying to find a place that could begin to compare to our perfect apartment, but I was disappointed over and over again.  Everything I found was too pricy, too far away, or just too gross to fathom.

However, the in-person search turned out to be much easier, and I learned a tough lesson about judging an apartment by its online listing. After a day of running around in our new, much smaller town (and coincidentally my boyfriend’s hometown), we felt defeated. When we were just about to call it quits, my boyfriend suggested that we visit a place I had ruled out in an earlier online search due to small square footage and a hefty price tag. Despite my protests, we made the trip anyway.

Looking around the building, I immediately felt a sense that this would be my new home. Each apartment they showed had a unique character all to itself. Formerly an old cotton mill, the apartments have a charm unlike any other, including exposed brick and 14-foot factory windows, and I was instantly in love. The price tag wasn’t all that bad either.

That night we poured over bank records and floor plans and finally decided to call the place our new home. In the beginning of our search, I was convinced that nothing would be as perfect as where we live now, but the new place has put those fears aside (the new apartment even has a set of French doors). As I write this, I go through spurts of packing and daydreaming about fun decorating projects for the new apartment. Although we will be staying with family throughout May while we wait for the apartment to come available in early June, I have a growing list of projects for our new home and a Pinterest board to match. So stay tuned…the journey has just begun!