The move is now official!

Great news: "I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance!" Just kidding. Actually, the great news is that a new tenant signed a lease today on the apartment we just left in Grandview. This is good because we moved before it was re-rented and could have feasibly been stuck with paying double-rent until it got rented (since we were technically breaking our lease).

Non-smokers live here, thank you very much...

There has been one drawback with moving into the new apartment. The landlord and his partner have been in here almost everyday fixing things up, both in our apartment (replacing the fan in the bathroom, for example, which sounded like a small helicopter taking off), and in the unit on the other side. Unfortunately, one of the guys working here is a heavy smoker, and I assume he must be smoking while he works in the other unit or down in the basement (but not actually in our unit). The smell permeates our living space, however, and is driving me a little insane. They really have been great landlords in the past, so we haven't said anything to them, but hopefully they don't have too many more things to work on and our new neighbor (who we've met, and is a non-smoker) will move in soon.

Hello, out there! Part II

So, let's call my previous blog attempt a trial run. I guess I should have done more research before I jumped right in, but oh well.

Postal Confusion

I suspected that our strange moving pattern might confuse the post office, and I was right. I spent about an hour yesterday with two branches of the postal service trying to untie a forwarding 'knot' that was preventing us from receiving any mail at the new address. Just so you know, if you move twice within six months (the length of time a forwarding order is active), you need to make sure you get the old forwarding order corrected, rather than just add a new forwarding request. On top of that, our mail carrier at the new address thought he was being helpful and when he saw mail for us at #742 he assumed it was a typo for #744 and forwarded it to our Grandview address...which in turn was being forwarded back to #742. My missing Netflix DVDs were delivered today so I think we got it all worked out now.

Why "German Village Idiot"?

Because quite frankly, Kurt and I have been feeling lately that our decision to move out of our tiny/cozy one-bedroom apartment in the German Village neighborhood of Columbus, OH, and into a bigger/newer/shinier two-bedroom apartment north of the Grandview neighborhood was...well...idiotic. Shall I count the ways?

• New apartment = noisy apartment
• New apartment = cheap apartment
• New landlord = crazy lady

Here's how it happened, basically. We were taken in by the apartment's 'luxury' touches, and the smooth sales pitch, and to be fair, there were many things we liked about the Drayton Park Court apartments, and we wanted the extra bedroom to set up an office and have a place for company to sleep (other than the kitchen floor).

Kurt was very clear about one thing with the apartment managers while they were showing us the apartment and during the lease-signing process, and that is that he is very sensitive to noise from other neighbors and he was concerned about being 'sandwiched' between two other tenants. They assured us these brand-new apartments were very well-built and had a layer of cement between the floors and we would not hear anything. In addition there was a very specific clause in the lease that stated that if your neighbors could hear "any" of your noise, that you would be in violation of the terms of the lease, so we felt pretty safe.

Of course you know where this is going. Directly above our apartment were three energetic graduate students, and we discovered almost immediately that even basic living noises transferred directly into our apartment. Oh, and they liked to party every Friday night. We actually met them, and they were quite nice and stopped the parties, but the apartments are so cheaply built that we could still hear them walking up and down stairs, opening and closing doors, walking across the floor, i.e. just basic living noise.

The entire experience is a very long story, but some highlights include: the landlord who kept asking us what WE were going to do about our noisy neighbors, a friendly visit from our neighborhood policeman (before we met the other tenants), and a prescription to sleeping pills. We finally talked to a lawyer who told us that we could just break the lease and the most they could collect from us was "damages", that is, rent from the time we left until they got it re-rented. Once we found this out, we started apartment hunting again.

Now here's the funny part. The apartment we found, and the apartment we moved into last weekend, was the same apartment we moved out of in German Village! Crazy? It might seem so, but it came down to either the extra bedroom or our sanity, and we really missed German Village. We are so happy to be back, and just to mix it up (and to confuse everybody who goes to update their address book), we moved to the opposite side of the two-unit apartment than we were in before. It's nearly identical (a mirror image for the most part), but it's actually the nicer of the two units as it is closer to the street and has more windows. On the plus side, while we were away the landlord here partially finished the basement, meaning we are going to have an office space after all and will fit much better into this space than we did before.

So here we are, back in German Village, and to celebrate I have started a blog.

New Address----- -----Old Address