So next week is the big week. The week we pack our final bags, say goodbye to Birmingham, and relocate to Memphis.  It’s almost surreal in a way.  We have spent the last month packing and saying goodbye to friends and our favorite spots in town but we haven’t actually left yet.

That all changes next week. I realize I left a bit of a cliff hanger the other week when I mentioned our new place. Things got crazy and I’m just now finding the time to type a few words.  And usually my intentions of typing a few words turn into typing a few hundred. I can’t help myself!  Typing is like therapy.  It’s so relaxing to just sit back and let my fingers tell the story.

So, here goes.  Moving to a new city can be overwhelming.  Moving to a new city where you know absolutely no one can be overwhelming.  Deciding where to live in that city where you are overwhelmed and don’t know a soul can be… difficult.

Michael Luke and I have dreamed and talked about “our next house” for years. physical characteristics we would like our house to have like a spacious front porch or historical marker and neighborhood traits like friends we hang out with as neighbors and kids for the girls to play with.  It’s not that difficult to find houses with the physical characteristics but sometimes it can take a little longer to find houses with the second.

Yeah, we could just pick a neighborhood, move in, and then hold our neighbors hostage until they become friends with us but we want to ease into things and really don’t think the neighbors would like us if we did that.  So, we have decided to rent for a while until we are able to find something that fits our dreams and plans for the future.

We looked at renting houses in Collierville but honestly there aren’t that many to choose from and the ones that fit our budget were smaller and outdated verses the larger and updated apartments available in the area.  So, we are choosing apartment living for a while.  Believe it or not I’m actually pretty excited about it.  Our new apartment will be slightly larger than our current house.  There will be new design challenges here and there and I look forward to tackling them and turning our apartment into a home.

The interior design geek in me always lays out every dwelling place we look at into some type of CAD software.  Now that I’m not working as an interior designer anymore and  I don’t have AutoCAD at my dispense for free I took advantage of a free website called Floorplanner.com.

This layout of this apartment at first was a turn off to me because of it’s somewhat shotgun approach but when we toured it in person I really liked it.  I liked how spacious the living and dining area is and I liked the distance of the girls’ room from the living room.  Plus, the linear layout gives the girls plenty of room to run around the place. I just hope the people below us don’t mind.

Noah and Esther are pretty excited about having their own “private” bathroom (that they have to share with guests), a playground right outside their front door, and a swimming pool with in walking distance.  I’m super excited to have an office and plan to turn it into my own personal motivational retreat area!  Michael Luke and I are both excited about simplifying our lives for a little while.  Some of our stuff will be in storage until we buy a house and while that may be discouraging for some people, we look forward to living with less for a while.  Who knows it may even help us realize that we don’t need everything that we think we do!

Has there ever been a time when your family chose to simplify things for a while?  What did you learn from it?

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