the great apartment debate of 2011 - prt 2

Even after the changes we made in the apartment to get the desk out of the kitchen, which I talk about in this post, I still wasn’t convinced that staying in the tiny apartment any longer than we absolutely had to was a good idea.

As stage 2, we decided to get rid of a storage unit that we’ve been paying for since Alex moved. I mentioned this in my post 10 ways to reduce your monthly expenses and then again in the description of numbers 3 and 4 on that list.

I posted pictures of the kitchen/desk in the last post, and here's how the living room looked before:

Here’s how that went…

Days til the end of the month: 5

 Alex and I talk, and figure out that we will try to get everything out of the apartment by the end of the month, to avoid paying one more month of rent on the storage unit.

Days til the end of the month: 4

We start trying to sell the couches in the living room and the table and chairs in the dining room to make room for the furniture from the storage unit.

Days til the end of the month: 3

Alex and I contact my uncle, who has a truck, to help us move some things from the storage unit to the apartment. We move a couch, a rug, a table, and four chairs. We also move a full size bed out of the unit and to my uncle’s house. Luckily, he was nice enough to agree to store it for us for awhile.

We still haven’t gotten rid of the other furniture, so in the tiny apartment is: two kitchen tables, 8 chairs, two large couches, one loveseat, and one extra end table.

We decide it's not worth trying to sell the furniture anymore and call the Salvation Army to come pick up the extra furniture, donating a couch/loveseat combo, small kitchen table, and four rolling chairs.

Days til the end of the month: 1

My dad is coming to visit today, so I decide that it’s not worth bringing all the small things from the apartment to the storage unit. We will let them prorate the rent for the next month, and not worry about it.

Later: My dad gets to the apartment, and it comes up that we are cleaning out the storage unit. I get overruled, by my dad and Alex, since my dad thinks it's a great idea, and all the stuff from the storage unit gets brought up to the apartment, and the storage unit is empty. Sigh.

It ended up working out really well, because my dad had just bought a house, and a lot of the extra stuff in the unit were things that had been duplicated when Alex and I moved in together. My dad was able to take a lot of the stuff and use it.

Honestly, when we started, I thought I would end up proving to Alex that we can’t fit all our stuff in the tiny apartment and that we’d just have to find a bigger place.

Here's what the apartment looks like now:

But, at the end of the day, I have to hand it to him, Alex was right. As a result, I was comfortable re-signing a year lease, and would even consider it when it is up this June as well, saving us upwards of $300/month.

It’s things like this that make it impossible to argue with him!

the great apartment debate of 2011 - prt 1

When Alex moved to Colorado, I just assumed that we would start looking for a house, or at least a two bedroom apartment. In my opinion, we needed something bigger than my one bedroom apartment. But, Alex really thought we could make it work with the one bedroom. At that point in time, Alex’s desk for work was in the dining room, which is painfully close to the living room. I was convinced that we needed another bedroom to make into Alex’s office.

After talking about it awhile, we discovered that the main reason I hated having just one bedroom was because when Alex was on the phone for work, there was nowhere for me to go, I couldn’t watch TV because it was in the living room. So, we made a plan to get Alex’s work desk into the bedroom.

In order to do that, we had to get rid of the dresser that was in the bedroom. To do that, we had to go through all our clothes and get rid of everything we didn’t wear (not that I don’t have plenty of that left!) and fit all the clothes into the closet. 

So, everything that was in this dresser had to fit in the closet! That is a story for another day! (Plus, we got $50 for the dresser!)

Just by moving the desk, the apartment looks bigger and my kitchen area seems much less cluttered. When Alex works, he can go into the bedroom and shut the door, leaving me free to make noise in the living room/kitchen/dining room.

I didn’t get a chance to take any before pictures, so just imagine this desk (I know, it's kind of mess at the moment):

in the corner of this space:

It was not good! Anyway, it feels much better to just have the table and bookcase in the dining room area again, like in the picture above.

Stay tuned for the final pictures (as well as how we managed to organize the closet!) as the great apartment debate continues!