Home Sweet Rental

I'd say Nick and I have had pretty consistent rotten luck when it comes to rentals, apartments, landlords and neighbors.  And I'm going to attribute that to where we live.  Unfortunately, that is just a sad fact about Utah.  Happy Valley college town especially.  This place we are living in now has by far been the best, minus the neighbors, but interiorly, it's been fantastic.  We we joking the other day that we wished we could just bring this place with us to Iowa.

So, since we discovered home buying isn't going to be possible until either I get a job and qualify alone, or Nick graduates from PhD school, we started looking for places to rent.   Kinda difficult considering we can't actually go and see any of the properties.  I was under the impression that the rental market in Iowa would be better than here because it is essentially cornville, but not really.  It's actually considerably more expensive.  A place like we are renting now is a couple hundred dollars more a month!  Paying a mortgage really would have been easier on our wallet.

I decided to put  up an ad on craigslist, just to see if we got any replies. And after a few scammy inquiries, a real landlord contacted us.  She had a house for rent about 15 minutes outside of Ames, the city where the university is, reasonably priced, three bedroom, with a backyard and garage.  Talk about a blessing!  After negotiating all the details, and looking at a lot of pictures, we told her we would  take it.  She and her husband only own a couple rental properties, renting to some other PhD families as well, and they  seem very grounded and responsible.  The told us they expect us to take care of the home as well as he property, and they live only a few minutes away.  So if we have any problems, they will be able to address them quickly!

We are SUPER excited!  The house is older, but it's been refurbished and well maintained, new appliances, lots of space, a basement in case a tornado comes, and there is even a play ground and dog house in the backyard for Korra!  Ohhhh, it is so nice to have peace of mind about our living situation, to know we have a place to move to, and it has plenty of space for all of us!.  One weird thing is the two bedrooms upstairs are connected, like a joined hotel room, you have to go through one to get to the other, so we were thinking about eventually turning that into the kids bedroom and playroom.  Keep their mess contained, haha.  We're going to need to buy a few more baby gates to block off different parts of the house, but it's going to be fabulous!

Ah!  I am so excited to get out there!