On finding a place to live

Today we signed a lease. The new landlady seems nice. She has said we don't need to pay the first part month's rent until Nathan gets paid next week, which is very helpful indeed. She is putting a new (well 3 year old recycled almost new) kitchen in. It looks great. The guy doing the installation is really friendly and helpful.

It is a nice spacious place, prolly built in the 80s from its style, double garage, open plan, half bath below, full bath above, three bedrooms, one of which runs across most of the width of the place (that will be our study), a loft area, storage in the attic above the other two bedrooms. We don't need to maintain the grass or deal with the sprinklers or anything (we are still freaked out on the watering grass thing). As Chris said, we would know the right place when we found it. Even better, it backs onto Spring Creek bike path - we just go to the end of the cul de sac and there it is! It is only about a mile to two places I can buy yummy me-safe food at.

Excellent!

The landpersons here seem to be a bit more relaxed than the ones at home. Or at least the ones renting to professionals seem to be. It seems that if we wanna do something, we just give our landlady a call and she will say yea or nay (why are yea and nay spelt differently?). You wanna plant a garden! Yippee! Go ahead! (Lynne says yippee too ;-) Hopefully they will still say yippee when they see it....

Now we just need furniture. Habitat for Humanity is looking good for some stuff. I bought some crockery from there. Forgot about other stuff like cutlery. The annoyingest part is that we are shipping across crockery and cutlery but it isn't here yet and probably won't be for at least another week. In the meantime we have to eat off something and with something, and I need to go buy new pots, chopping board, knives.... (The place I now have three 20% off coupons for is looking good.) The furniture place up by the I25 might have great prices but currently they are great prices that are out of our reach. Doh! At least I got to go ont eh I25 and drive at 75 mph - FAST! VROOOM! Our highway maxes are a bit under 70mph I think (110kmh).

Something I noticed here is that there are seemingly very few cheap furniture places. In Oz, I could outfit half the house for under $1000, as long as I don't mind the stuff being made out of pine (radiata pine, the tree that is endangered in its home habitat in California but grown in half of Oz in plantations). OK, it won't last more than 5-10 years if you are careful with it but when you need stuff and can't afford noice stuff, it is handy. Not so here! Well not that I've found so far.... I have one last place to look at, see what they have. Two more places - there is a place that rents out furniture. That could be good.

So today, as expected, is a better day. Still if those of you who commented could hang out with me, that would be great! Also since Nathan isn't hanging around at the moment, I can get to edit some pics and maybe get them online. But don't hold your breath waiting....