New York

Apartment hunting in New York is a little slice of hell on earth. Don't be fooled by the smiles below. There wasn't a ton of happiness on this trip!



It was fun to see my sister Ash though. She's a nanny in Jersey and she came out for a day to help us on the hunt. It was great to see her.
We also had a celebrity sighting. We LOVE The Good Wife, and we walked right passed Will Garner on the street. Literally right passed him. He was on his phone though, so we didn't want to be rude and dumb and ask for a picture so we did the only logical thing. We crossed the street and took a picture of Marc with him in the background. He's got a sweater and jeans on and he's on his phone. On the right side of this picture above Marc's shoulder. Haha...it was pretty exciting for us.

In the end we found a place. It's beautiful and perfect in every way...except that it's a ton of money. But we love it. I'm really excited to move in. In this case though getting there was NOT half the fun. The search was awful and terribly depressing at times.

For instance: Most people I'd talked to back there live in one bedroom apartments, but they've divided their living space, or have really large walk in closets and they make it work. We'd been planning on doing this to keep the apartment with in our budget, and to get a little nicer place instead of a bigger not so nice place. I realized once we'd been out there though that many of the people I'd talked with had moved to New York with only one child. Because we had two kids most one bedroom apartments wouldn't even show to us. Several people told me that they'd only allow 3 people to share a one bedroom. Like a 3 year old and a 7 month old would be the same as 3 grown adults! Lame! It was depressing though.

So we looked at a lot of two bedrooms, and really big one bedrooms that were less strict. Our last day there we went to two two bedroom apartments on the west side. One was a two bedroom in an awesome location. It was right across the street from the Museum of Natural History. But it was a ground floor apartment and was literally the most filthy place I have ever seen. Disgusting in every way! The next place we went to had a totally new kitchen and was considerably nicer on the inside, but it too was a ground floor apartment, and it was right across the street from a big project. (Yep like government housing project). Ground floor apartment. Windows facing the project. No thank you!

We even went out to Westchester to see if suburb life would suit us better. We had a great broker out there take us to see a bunch of places. We had told her we wanted to be close to the train, and so we looked at mostly older houses that were multi family homes. Anyway, we were looking at one of the last apartments and the broker said, "Oh hey this one even has AC." That took me back, and I said, "What do you mean...they haven't all had AC?!" Apparently AC and disposals aren't standard in the suburbs. Westchester ended up not being quite the utopia I'd thought it would be. We may very well move there later on, but if we do I think I'll be specific that I'd like to look at new construction.

The place we ended up going with is really nice. It has all the amenities I'd hoped for. It's in the 90's on the Upper East Side. It's a one bedroom with a den. The girls will sleep in the den. It doesn't have a lot of square footage (I think it's under 750 Sq. Feet). But it's a pretty new building, and it's only a block from the subway and 3 blocks from Central Park. It was definitely far and away our favorite place we saw. It just took some negotiating, and some more looking at gross apartments before we decided on it. We really love it. We move in October 15th!

Thank goodness that's over! :)