trying to figure out housing!

Well, our poor family has lived apart for 3 months now. Our house still hasn't sold. We got a new agent this week & were feeling very positive about our new listing with better pictures and remarks (that only agents see). But unless our new agent is showing it without telling us (unlikely), it hasn't produced anything yet. We signed with this new guy until 2/15, then we're going to try and rent it out. We're hoping that is quicker & easier!

So our plan is to pack up all of our belongings on 2/14 (fun Valentine's day activity, huh?), then move them up to Vancouver, WA (houses are quite a bit cheaper in Vancouver than Portland, even though it's right across the Columbia river). If we can sell or rent it by then, we'll move into an apartment at that point (even if we sell, we'd like to get to know the area before committing to a house). If not, I guess it might go in storage. Unless we decide it's time to just time to start paying an extra cost so we can live together as a family. So we have a semi-plan, contingent on several things (some in our control, some not).

I've spent a LOT of time lately looking at apartments (my parents are probably really annoyed!). We need a 3 bedroom apartment that allows large dogs. It's pretty hard to find! And there are so many factors to weigh, it's hard to know what's important.

Since part of the reason to rent is to get to know the area we want to live, I'd like to live in an apartment complex near a good elementary school. I've been looking on schooldigger.com, which ranks the 1058 elementary schools in Washington (and other states, too, that's just what I've been looking at). There's one school that's #21 in the entire state! I'd like to live in that school's boundary! I found Heritage Green apartments that would go there, allows large dogs, and has 3 bed/2 bath 1446 sq ft apartments. When I was looking last week it was listed to rent $1015 a month. I just looked again to find out what hours they're open tomorrow, and it's gone up! It now says $1125-1200! Rude!

I'm kind of thinking we might just have to do that, though, because nothing else sounds very good. There are 4 other apartment complexes with mediocre schools (ranging from 441-584th in the state), but I think there's something wrong with all of them. I'm pretty sure one of them only has electric dryer hook-ups (the others actually have washers & dryers, so ours will have to go in storage I guess), and we have a gas dryer. One is only 1021 sq feet! Two of them have really poor ratings on apartmentratings.com, but that's so subjective I don't know if I should worry.

Then there are 6 other complexes that have 3 bedroom apartments that allow large dogs, but they have worse schools. One is 914 out of 1058! Yuck! But really, does it matter THAT much if the school is 584th or 780th? We can still get to know Vancouver without renting exactly where we want to buy. I don't really want to buy in the 584th school boundary anyways! Hopefully we'll only be renting for 6 months, so David would go to a little bit of kindergarten, that's it. When we buy, it'll be a much bigger deal.

So, the kids & I are driving down to Vancouver tomorrow to look at some apartments with Dan. I'm going to make some sort of map showing where acceptable apartments are so we can go check them out. Then hopefully we can make a decision!