New Diggs

After a long and exhausting search of homes to buy and apartments to rent all over the Portland metro area we settled on a spot. I can hardly believe it! It really felt like the day would never come! There were so many factors to consider - the greatest being that this would be the place we will plan to birth and begin our babe's life. Plus Olive is such an active little thing we had to decide if we could do without a yard. Grant really wanted to continue living the urban lifestyle and since it doesn't seem like there will be a better time in our life to give that a go we focused our apartment hunt downtown. And we found ONE! Amazingly, it has two bedrooms, is just outside the Pearl, has a dishwasher, fireplace and is affordable! There is a lot of work to be done to make it pretty so here are the before pics. I took them real quick this weekend so please excuse the grainy/blurry parts...

what you see from the front door

the living room and fireplace is to the right

you walk straight ahead into the dining room. We can still use our table!!

the dining room has three big windows which help with keeping it bright!

opposite the dining room windows is a door to the 'master' bedroom...it has black moldings and a serious lack of closet space, but we are working on improving both...

from the master you can go to the left in to the bathroom. It has a cute, old clawfoot tub which is charming, but needs some TLC in general...

The bathroom is a 'jack and jill' that leads into the other bedroom, which will be the nursery.

Its pretty small, but should serve the babe well. I'm really excited to start decorating it!

there is a tiny door from the nursery that wraps back around to the kitchen. The other entries to the kitchen are from the back of the apartment or from the dining room. I'm sure its hard to visualize, but its basically a big circle.

this place is not our dream home by any means, but allows us to affordably live downtown and also have a second room for baby. the other bonus is that we are on a month to month lease (we didn't even ask for that!) so we can leave as soon as we want or need to. Not that we think we'll leave soon, but if our dream home comes on the market and we just have to buy it we won't have to worry about breaking the lease!

our stuff will arrive from storage a week from friday... and we have to get every inch of this place painted before then. Wish us luck!