We Came, We Saw, We Rented…

Another weekend in North Carolina, 3 out of the last 5 in fact, so many we should just move there… So we are. But first we had to find a place to live, and that wasn’t easy as we had a limited time frame and different ideas of what a future home should be.

It was also made a bit more difficult as we were trying for a particular area, that being Huntersville/Lake Norman area.

First up was a house located on Rainbow Row of Birkdale Village, which, coincidentally, is the same neighbourhood that Robyn’s sister lives in and we love it dearly. This is a super cute little house, but that’s the problem, it’s a little house… The bedrooms barely have enough room to swing a cat, let alone the three we have and even though it’s double the square footage of our now dreadfully cramped 1 bedroom condo, there wasn’t enough room for everything we want. Another minus point was it has the most expensive rent of all the houses we saw, which is a shame as we actually wanted to like it so much as they are super cute little houses to look at.

But at that point in time it was the lead house, pretty much by default. Later on that day we went to see a townhouse around the corner from the Rainbow Row Easter Egg house, this was much nicer, but the big downside about it was, well, people were still living there and we need to move in next weekend. But no big loss as we would see two near identical houses the following day.

This townhouse was vacant, the letter was really flexible, but while it was nearly identical to the house the previous night, we passed on it as we saw another townhouse that was vacant, available and had upgrades over this house like a big bay window in the master bedroom, hardwood floors in the lounge and kitchen, it was basically just nicer. But we had to wait a long time on this as we needed answers to questions like “can we paint the walls?” as the walls were painted bright greens, blues and yellows, it was dramaticaly bright colours, not our pallette. We also needed to know if cats were allowed which as you can imagine, is very important to us.

To cut a long story short, we took the last townhouse, we’re allowed to paint it, the cats are allowed, it’s much nicer than the rest and it has enough room for our needs… But I’ll still talk about the huge house we looked at in another neighbourhood.

This was a seriously huge house, and the rent was comparable to the townhouses, but it was too big for us. 1800 square foot on the inside (but no garage which sucked) would mean spending a lot more money filling it out. The location was also not the greatest in the world, the main reason we were looking at Birkdale was it has a little town centre within walking distance (like 0.2 miles) which has a movie theatre, shopping, bookstores, coffeehouses etc and that was a huge appeal. I mean, why drive when everything we need is a couple of minutes walk away? Plus Lake Norman is within spitting distance and we’re trying to get out of the Atlanta mentality of driving everywhere. But anyways, this house was pretty awesome, if location, location, location wasn’t important, I would have seriously thought about this house based on the kitchen alone. We were joking that each utensil we have (and we have a fair few) could be given it’s own drawer with plenty left empty. The kitchen area took up half of the bottom floor, and in my rough calculations that equals around 400 square feet… for a kitchen! Our current condo is just over 700 square feet just to put it in perspective.

But we’re happy with the townhouse we chose, good size, good location, good price, so now we move in (hopefully) over next weekend, then we come back to Atlanta to fix up our condo and put it on the market to sell… We just hope it doesn’t take too long.

Anyone looking for a 1 bedroom, top floor condo with elevator access, attic access, close to GA400 and I285 and within walking distance of Sandy Springs MARTA station?