Bloom Where You're Planted

The last few weeks have been a little overwhelming. We decided to move to a bigger apartment. In the course of two weeks we applied for several apartments, went to a few open houses, looked at a million different apartments for rent online, and then finally, last Monday found one we liked that we could also afford. We filled out the applications on Monday, got approved for the apartment on Wednesday, packed all of our belongings Wednesday and Thursday, moved on Friday, and cleaned our old apartment on Saturday and Sunday.

Apartment hunting and then moving is awful!

But we are here, and all we have left to do is unpack everything.

We've loved our first home as a married couple and we are so sad to leave it. If there was a way to just add a bedroom for Rose onto it, we would have done that, but we've had too many late/sleepless nights to stay there for much longer.

We now live in the top floor of an old old house (it looks haunted from the outside, and I'm pretty sure the bottom floor is empty). ((Perfect for Halloween, except I won't let Ryan decorate it extra creepy, because I don't like creepy/scary Halloween. Sorry Ryan.))

But, the inside is more cheerful. :) It has such charming windows and pretty hardwood floors. There is a little bit of stained glass in our bedroom and in one of the bathrooms there is a claw foot bathtub!

This door leads onto a small balcony that's off our living room. 

There are a few issues with the new apartment.

For one, our kitchen is teeny tiny. Our table for four won't fit in it, so we are trying to get rid of that. I'll also have to adjust to having very little counter space, and a little oven.

Another thing, we have a little rickety staircase, with two turns, that leads up to our apartment. Just getting our smaller furniture into the apartment was difficult. We were already planning on getting rid of our couch, but now we aren't sure we'll be able to get ANY couch up those stairs. So, any suggestions on other (cheap) seating arrangements for a living room are welcome.

You may have noticed that the title of this blog post is "Bloom Where You're Planted." I am super bad at doing this. It took me almost a year to really feel comfortable and useful in our last ward. I also never really got around to decorating our apartment the way I wanted it.

This time around, I am determined to make this apartment one that I enjoy being in. I'm also determined to make friends quicker and to start being a part of the ward as soon as possible.

All in all, I'm super excited about our new apartment, and I will continue to post pictures as we progress in the decorating process, we already bought two rugs, which is huge for us! It took us 4 months to find a table when we first got married.

Lucky for us, even though it will probably take some effort for me to "bloom where I'm planted", I have a sweet little Rose that is blooming wherever she goes. (Except for right now, as she is crying out to me because I've been trying to get her to take a nap for the last two hours. This is my 3rd attempt. The little stinker.)