Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Bigger Apartment?

I mentioned a couple days ago that we are trying to save money for a new apartment.  Since J will (hopefully) be starting med school next May, we aren't in the right place right now to be buying a house.  Since we're not sure if we'll be able to stay in Florida for his residency, we don't want to buy a place and then have to worry about selling it in 4 years, which would probably result in us losing money.

So, we think the next best thing would be to move into a bigger apartment.  It's $100 more a month, but we're getting about 400 square feet more, which includes a ton of storage space.  It's in the same complex, so moving wouldn't be too hard at all.  


This is our current apartment and it has a nice open floor plan.  It's 1140 square feet and has a small balcony off of the living room.  The living room is huge and has plenty of room for everything.  You won't ever feel cramped in this apartment.

The downsides of this apartment are the kitchen and the bedrooms.  The kitchen has very limited counter space and the cabinet space is kind of lacking as well.  I'm currently working on organizing the kitchen so that I have more room, but that task is proving to be kind of hard.  The dining room also kind of bugs me because it's not really a dining room.  It's just a little space off of the living room.
 
The bedrooms are also kind of an annoyance.  In each room, the closets take up an entire wall.  That creates a lot of problems when trying to organize the space.  We really want an office, but it's really hard to fit a bed and two desks into the one bedroom.  If we were to stay in this apartment, we would need to get rid of the guest bed.  That wouldn't be that big of a deal because we don't have house guests too terribly often.


This is the bigger apartment.  This apartment is 1530 square feet.  It has an extra bedroom and also a dedicated room for the dining table.  The balcony is also like 3 times the size of the one in our current apartment.  There is 2 pantries in this apartment, so I would have plenty of storage area for food and pans.  There is also a large linen closet in the hallway, which is about 2-3 times the size of our current linen closet.  The closet in the master bedroom is also a walk-in!

There are a couple downsides to this apartment though and that is one of the reasons we're waiting a while before we move in.  We want to debate the pros and cons between the two because we make a drastic move.  The living room is a good bit smaller than our current one.  Our living room furniture will be a little more cramped in this apartment and I might end up having to move some of it into a different room.

The master bedroom is the same size as our current bedrooms, which is a plus.  The two extra rooms are significantly smaller though.  That's not such a big deal though since one would be an office and one would be a guest bedroom. 

All in all, I hope we have the money to move into the bigger apartment when our lease is up in 7 months.  I think it will do us good to have a bigger space.  

If you were in this situation, would you move to the bigger apartment or stay in the one we're currently in?

2 comments:

  1. BIGGGGGGER! I would kill for a 3rd bedroom.

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  2. That's a toughy. The money and the living room furniture would be big issues for me, but all that storage space would be nice. But I've found when I have more storage space, I'm more inclined to fill it with junk I don't really need. Might be worth it to save the $100 toward an eventual down payment or big vacation.

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