Rental House Review

The bf and I move into our new (purchased) digs this week!  As I'm sitting in my living room of our rental, it hit me that there will be a few things I'll miss about this house.  Our new place is about 300 square feet smaller and would appraise for less than our rental, but regardless of the size and value, we feel like it's a step up.

The yard at the new place is smaller, so it should be a lot less time-consuming to manage, but I will miss the beautiful kockout roses that surround our lawn....

and our neighbor's pomegranate tree that straddles our property line.

Our Secret Garden-style backyard...

 

I'll miss the natural light streaming in from this window while I work...

Most of all, I will miss the location.  Even though we're moving less than four miles away and are still far, far away from the burbs, we'll no longer be walking distance to our favorite bars and restaurants.  C'est la vie!

 

To be fair and completely candid, there's a lot that I won't miss.  I won't miss being told we can only get a dog if we pay a $500 pet deposit and $150 a month (ridiculous!).  This guy looks pretty cute...

I won't miss being told I can't paint the walls (even though I did in the back mudroom and the laundry room because I couldn't stand the aged eggshell color).

I won't miss the random feral cats that come creeping around our place, or listening to the sound of rodents (or possibly large cockroaches?) clawing the inside of the walls. 

I won't miss the tiny, inefficient kitchen.  It's apparent the guy who owns the place (and lived here for ten years before he rented it to us) was not a cook.

I especially won't miss worrying about seven doors being locked at night.  Seven doors!!  Our new place will only have two, like a normal house.  Oh, and we'll only  have one bill for our electric, one for water, and one for gas.  (When you live in a house that used to be a duplex, you get two of everything.)

I've had such a tumultuous relationship with this house since we moved in last year.  The bf and I loved it when we saw it, and it is an amazing oasis in a very urban area, but after moving in (I, mostly) started to go crazy as we noticed more and more imperfections.  I try to embrace wabi-sabi, but the worst part about the imperfections is they were someone else's, not mine, and I wasn't allowed to make my own mistakes in this house.  I'm thrilled to own a place that I can decide what color the walls will be, etc...  It's our own, and to me, that's what makes a home.