Saturday 5 April 2014

Renter's Paradise.

The day that Garth and I buy our first home might be the happiest day of my life. Okay, maybe not but it will be in the top 10 for sure. There are so many reasons why renting is absolutely the worst thing in the world.
  1. Paying for someone else's mortgage. 
  2. When something goes wrong with the place, you have to wait for your landlord to fix it. And when they are not living there, it is never their priority. (To be fair, our new landlord is really good about this so far).
  3. You have to deep clean the whole place yourself before you can move in. When we first moved in, there were layers and layers of dust everywhere, someone else's hair in the bathroom drawers and a giant dirty sock behind the dryer, not to mention the oven hadn't been cleaned in years.
  4. Not being able to paint...and you don't want to spend money on home decor in such a temporary living situation
  5. At both our rental places we have lived in so far, we had problems with the tub draining. What I am about to say next proves that I have the best husband in the whole world because twice now he has had to go in there and pull out gobs and gobs of someone else's old, gross, wet, ratty hair out of there. I wanted to die!!!
  6. Having people in your lives that you just really don't want to be there. Whether you are upstairs or down you can hear everything. When they are talking, yelling, singing, watching a movie, blasting music, naked wrestling, you name it, you get to be a part of it. Lucky you!
Now I am not trying to sit her and complain about everything, I write about this so I can remember. When I look back on these years when Garth was in school and we were moving from rental place to rental place, I want to remember all the funny, crazy, gross, horrible, amazing things that happened. 

Despite the frustrating experiences, I am aware of the benefits of our renting situations as well.
  1. When something is wrong, your landlord has to deal with it.
  2. It is an easy way to live somewhere temporarily and ideal for students like ourselves.
  3. You learn dos and don'ts for when you move in or build your own house that you normally wouldn't think about. 
  4. Awesome neighbours! Not only did we have fantastic neighbours across the fence in our first place, we also got to live right across the alley from Jace and Vicky and Neil and Michelle. It was so awesome and convenient heading across the alley to go hangout and we both definitely miss it.
  5. You sometimes run into a place that you really love. And we do. Despite how much I hate renting, I really do love our place.

After living in a basement suite for the first 2 years of our marriage, moving into this home was a breath of fresh hair. Tall ceilings, big windows, I didn't have to walk upstairs and go outside to see what the weather was like or to get reception on my phone. Plus our landlord is our doctor so we get house calls when Grant is sick haha.

Renting is really hard when you work for Vivint, because we move away somewhere different for 4 months of the year. Obviously any landlord doesn't want to miss out on 4 months of rent cheques so we were going to have to give up our place for the summer and find somewhere new to live when we came back in September. We really didn't want to move out of this place because it is actually perfect for us right now and it just started feeling like home, so we set out on a difficult feat to find someone to live in our house for 4 months. After about a month of searching, we found someone that we know and trust to live in our house! It was the perfect situation, they do not have any furniture and they are only looking for a place for the summer and are planning on moving away in September. It was the perfect situation for both parties!

Our Home

Entryway



Living Room 



Dining Area 





Kitchen





Laundry Room



Bathroom



Grant's Room


I blogged about Grant's nursery HERE.

Our Room




I am obsessed with home decor so it is hard sometimes to live somewhere and not really decorate, but it would be even harder to waste money and decorate a place that is not truly mine. 

Someday, we both look forward to buying a house, having nice matching furniture and freshly painted walls with color schemes we carefully picked out ourselves. Until then, I am happy here, living in renter's paradise.

1 comment:

  1. We lived on the corner (86) and our place was the exact same. We loved that home so much! SO bright. Your house is way less crowded than ours though. And your room is clean. haha Ours never is. We lived in a dark dingy old basement before our place like this so this was amazing!

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