In our thirteen years of marriage we have moved 11 times (this is #11). I don't even know how many times I moved before that growing up in the Air Force and throughout college. I don't mind moving. In fact I often embrace change and moves as fresh starts. But I'm not excited to be renting again. I AM excited about building a house and if renting is part of the equation, bring it on!
But in our 11 moves, we've had some bad renting experiences and some good.
Our first apartment (basement to boot) had both good and bad. The good was that it was around the corner from one of my best friends and just a few blocks from BYU where I was a student (and we only had one car so I needed to walk most of the time). Also good was the cheap rent ($350/month and no utilities). Bad was that our sink plumbing was somehow connected to our owner's washing machine plumbing. It's not fun to come home to black sludge oozing out of your kitchen sink when something goes wrong with the washer upstairs.
The home we rented before we bought our current house had a mostly non-working oven. Not good when you live there for a year and don't know if your casserole gets to finish cooking or not before the oven shuts off. Or the birthday cake. Or the muffins. Or the cookies. Troy and I are not shy about voicing concerns but somehow the landlords kept putting off repairs and maintenance and did not want to fix things on the house so the oven remained like that pretty much until right before we moved. That was just one of MANY things wrong in that house.
And now we are back to renting and I'm a little worried. Things looked okay when we checked out the house and it has the size and rent price we were looking for. But I think we are discovering that things were not quite as they appeared. I'm hoping the things we noticed while moving our stuff in were just minor things. AND that the odd smell fades eventually. Please, oh please fade.
The good about this house is that it's next door to really nice friends. Also good is that we only have a 6 month lease. I can live anywhere 6 months, especially if it means saving a lot of money.
I've been in Cali, shooting . . .
9 hours ago













