The Apartment Search is OVER!

I'm sure many people would find our apartment search extremely exhausting.  I swear we aren't picky people.  We wanted 1. safety 2. good location 3. 3 bedrooms if possible 4. dishwasher 5. in suite laundry.

Not too tough, right??  Two kind of fell by the wayside on our quest for #1.

We started out using a superhelpful organizer from our friend CAJ, who just found an apartment with her hubby and baby in a completely new city as well.  They had the luxury of taking a trip to choose an apartment.  We really did not have that luxury - especially on our other quest of saving money for the BIG MOVE.  I called a bunch of nice places in what seemed like a nice area - and one that was close (10-15 mins.) from JJ's school.  Oh, at this point we also had an apartment helper through the school. 

So I'm a bit on the overly cautious side, but somehow we got into this apartment rating dealy that made us a bit more paranoid than ever.  And by us I mean me.  Basically it led me into another whole path to for sure find the safest place.  With that, we began seeking other people's advice.  When I made it "facebook official" that we were moving, lots of people let us know they had relatives in the area or they themselves lived there.  It was GREAT to get big city dwellers' advice.

THEN I had the brilliant (are you catching on to my paranoia of the whole moving thing?) idea to call the police department and have them recommend neighborhoods.  I was chatting with a lady from the "crime analysis department" and basically I told her the name of the place we were very seriously considering.  She said, "I'm not allowed to give personal preferences but DO NOT MOVE THERE especially since you have a daughter."  Oh jeez.  BACK to square one.  She had a website that tracked crimes over the last two years and we began our search all over again.

In the end we settled on a place that within a one mile radius has had three crimes in the last 18 months -- all of them being cars broken into.  Well, I can definitely deal with that - especially since we don't keep anything valuable in our cars and our vehicles are not fabulous.  And c'mon crime happens everywhere, even if I still wish everyone would just get along and not be naughty.

Our apartment is 1. as safe as we could get it without being a gated community costing us one of these and one of these (an arm and a leg) 2. about 30 mins. from JJ's school 3. 3 bedroom (but slightly above our desired price = we're doing without cable and highspeed internet) 4. has a dishwasher and 5. comes with full sized washer and dryer in suite.  Also, it's gorgeous and big and we welcome all friends and family members!