We moved into our apartment complex and we have loved it! It’s only a few years old, there is a gym and they have a TRASH VALET! What?! It’s amazing! You leave your trash can outside of your door each night and they pick up your TRASH for you!! The amazing thing is that this apartment complex wasn’t the most expensive in the area, it was just the right fit for us!! The added bonus is FREE TRASH PICK-UP!!!

So after a month of living here…. give or take a few… ok maybe 14 travel days, we have realized a few things. If we’re crazy… just don’t leave a comment. If we’re normal, let us know!!

1. Bokeh growls at EVERY little sound. He’s not used to his new home yet and it’s getting a little ridiculous! We leave CMT playing on the TV when we leave the house just to keep him from hearing anything!!
2. Our neighbor likes garlic… unfortunately. We have candles in every nook and cranny and yet we cannot seem to escape the smell of our neighbor’s dinner at times! It’s the worst!!! If you see me and I smell like garlic, that’s why.
3. It’s harder to keep a small space clean. Just coming home from a shoot makes the living room look like a BOMB went off!!
4. The “spare” bedroom for guests is really just a “spare closet”.
5. The street lamps (because we’re on the first floor) create an inescapable GLOW throughout the night and Michael has woken up TWICE in the middle of the night and thought the sun was coming up!! These things are BRIGHT!!
6. You have to be on puppy-potty alert constantly. I can’t just open the door and let Bokeh run out like I used to. I have to have a coat and shoes!
7. We have the crappiest cars in the parking lot! haha Michael and I don’t ever want car payments and so we drive very basic cars… like, we JUST BOUGHT a Tahoe with 183,000 miles on it! So when we park next to the Infinities and the Audi’s and the BMW’s… I just have to remind myself that we’re investing in other things and our little basic cars work just fine!!
8. We have a POOL! Michael makes us put our feet in when we walk past it just to make sure we’re not missing prime layout time! … Like I’m going to ever layout… HA! I’d fry. #redheadprobs
9. We have been using the gym and we love it!!! It’s small and it’s DEAD during the day so we go in the afternoon together! Lets pray this continues.
10. We can’t yell. We’re normal… we have fights…. we raise our voices every now and then. I forget that people can HEAR our fights now and so it’s actually been good for us to just talk it out because we literally CAN’T let it escalate!
11. Michael won’t let me hang ANYTHING on the walls! No curtains. No Frames. No ANYTHING! It’s miserable! (This is one reason why #10 takes place!) He says it’s temporary but I like living in a space that feels like home! We’ll see who wins! haha
12. We’ve realized that we have a storage unit full of stuff that we really don’t need. It’s amazing how you can collect so much CRAP in just 5 years of marriage. We’re thankful for this season of living a more simplified life. We’re learning a lot about ourselves in the process and it’s so good for us!!!

Hopefully we’re not the only ones who have stories like this from apartment living!! We have 7 more months here and so we’re looking forward to pool days and not having a yard to take care of! We’re going from NO yard to 7 ACRES… talk about a big shift!! Thanks for reading!!

Happy Thursday Friends!

To learn more about our house building process, follow HMH on Instagram!

To read how we bought land that wasn’t for sale, click here!

To read why we’re moving in the first place, click here!