Apartment Shma-shmartment!

Ever since we moved to Louisville, we've been busy unpacking, getting ready for our vacation, unpacking from vacation, and winding down. This past week was the first week where I felt like we were "home," and unfortunately, I haven't been very happy with our apartment. Once we got settled in, I started to notice all of the little, nagging things that come with living in a 50 year old four-plex building. None of them are big enough to mention, but all the little things put together really started to aggravate me. Then, add to that the two yapping dogs upstairs, the construction going on next door, and the gaggle of drunk girls that gathered outside my bedroom window at 4 AM on Saturday morning, and now you have sleepless nights to accompany the "small things," thus turning them into huge annoyances during the day.

So, first thing tomorrow morning, Chud and I are meeting with a mortgage lender to find out how much we can, and should, spend on a house. We drove around a lot of neighborhoods here in Louisville this weekend, I've been reading up on the schools and communities around here, and I have a pretty good idea of some places where we might want to live. The only reason we haven't bought a house yet is because our savings is so slim and we cannot afford the down payment for the kind of house we want to buy. Until now, I was dead set on saving enough for a down payment. However, I've been meeting more and more people who have bought a house without one, and I've been reading a lot of articles about the dying trend of down payments, especially for first-time home buyers. Not to mention I've seen three or four episodes of "My First Home" on TLC where the couples were buying much bigger, more expensive houses than the ones we want and were doing it with no down payment. Consider me convinced.

Now that a real "home" is just around the corner, I can start to cope with the every-day annoyances in our last apartment. I know that a home will come with it's share of annoyances as well, but they'll be our problems to fix and the place will be our own. I want to paint walls, for Pete's sake! I want to decorate for real instead of for "fake."

I am so DONE with apartments. Real home, here we come!