Almost perfect

As you probably know, Jon Boy is starting a masters program at BYU. He starts summer term, or June 23rd to be precise. My due date is May 30th. Sometime between when the baby is born and July 1st, we need to move.

I’ve moved before. I’ve moved on tight deadlines before. I’ve moved while working full time before. I’m pretty good at moving, if I say so myself. I do worry a little about doing it with a newborn while recovering from giving birth, but mostly I’m optimistic. My mom will be coming out for a week to help with the baby, and she’s said she’ll help pack while she’s here. Also, babies have a tendency to sleep a lot when they’re brand new. Of course, I’ll need to sleep a lot as well, but I think there will still be a half hour here or there when I can pack. Besides, Jon Boy can always help out too. And I’m hoping to arrange things such that I don’t need to cook at all from the birth of the baby until moving day.

What I am stressing out about is finding somewhere to live. See, I have absolutely no intention of driving an hour each way with a newborn and a toddler in tow just to view apartments that might not be any good anyway. I won’t have time or patience for that in the first weeks of the baby’s life, even if I weren’t trying to move too. Which means I need to find a place, have a contract signed, before the baby’s born.

Babies have a tendency of being born at rather inconvenient times. What if he came May 15th instead of May 30th? To be safe, we really need to have signed a contract by May 15th, then. And May 15th is about two weeks away.

With this in mind, I’ve been searching faithfully every day for more than two months on Craigslist, KSL, and BYU’s site for apartments. Here’s what we need:

• Something opening up in June
• Two or three bedrooms
• Air conditioning or swamp cooler
• Washer/dryer hookups (we have our own, so a washer and dryer in the unit is no good either)
• A dishwasher or really cheap rent and a place to put a portable
• Some sort of grassy area that isn’t a postage stamp and isn’t right on a street (for Lego and eventually Duplo*)

Here are the problems:

• Apartments opening in June are almost impossible to find right now. They’ll probably be easy to find, say, at the end of May and in early June. I can’t wait until the end of May. I definitely can’t wait until early June.
• Apparently, apartments meeting even conditions 2–4 (let’s say we give up on the yard) are extremely rare in Provo. Funny, I would have thought most people want air conditioning and dishwashers. A heck of a lot of people want to do their laundry at home. I just don’t get it.

The good thing is that two-bedroom apartments are pretty affordable down there, and a lot of them come with some utilities included.

I found one place that looked perfect. It advertised a yard with a sandbox (yay!), it met all our requirements, it opened up in early July (Jon Boy said he’d be fine commuting to school for a week), and it looked pretty nice from the outside. Then we found out that the couple who was going to move in July had decided to stay. Nothing opening up after all. So sorry.

Then yesterday, I found another place. The price was about what I’d expected to spend on a two bedroom, but it’s got three. I’d given up hope on three bedrooms, actually. It has all the necessary elements: dishwasher, central air, fenced grassy area far from the street, hookups. It has some nice extras too: a covered parking space, lots of storage, and double sinks in the bathroom. It opens up June 1, so we’d have to pay for two or so weeks when we didn’t live there, but I’m okay with that if it means we get to live somewhere great.

The only problems are ugly, dirty carpet (no worse than we’ve had before, though, and now we have two area rugs) and small bedrooms. Really small bedrooms. All three are the same size, which is about 8′ x 10′. They’re small enough that we won’t be able to fit all our nice bedroom furniture in our bedroom. I think we can get the crib, toddler bed, changing table, dresser, and toys into the boys’ room, but I’m not 100% sure. The third room would be our office (yay for Jon Boy having a private place to do homework!), so we might be able to put extra bedroom furniture (my huge dresser) in there.

Everything logical in me says to go for it. So what if the place where we sleep is tiny? So what if a few toys make the boys’ room look totally cluttered because there just isn’t room for it? The living room and kitchen are plenty big, so we can just hang out there most of the time. Or outside.

The manager just called and said they’d like to sign a contract with us if we’re interested.

Why is it that I don’t know if I am? It’s so close to perfect. I have two weeks to find something better, and I suspect I’m just not going to. Definitely not something with a fenced yard and three bedrooms.

But a part of me is thinking, we’re going to live in Provo for two to three years. I don’t want to spend that whole time feeling cramped and unhappy with where we live. (With two kids in a two-bedroom apartment, though, I don’t know how we’ll really feel otherwise no matter where we live.) I want to sign a contract for a place where I can feel satisfied enough that I don’t feel the need to move again until Jon Boy’s done.

*sigh* I’m probably just getting cold feet about making a big decision.