Moving!

Hello all!  This past week has been crazy busy for us as we have had work, Ashley's internship, my birthday/Independence Day and.. oh yeah... moving!  Yes, as of July 1st Ashley and I have moved out of our first apartment as a married couple and into another apartment.  This apartment is a bit nicer, with 2 bedrooms, central air (which has been one of Ashley's favorite things), a better kitchen, dishwasher, washer/dryer hookups and happens to be just below a couple of our best friends!

This all happened quite suddenly though.  Ashley and I have casually looked at new apartments a couple of times in the past year, but always ended up deciding to stay.  However, we often asked ourselves that if we had a place like our friends, Steven and Kayla, would we take it?  We would usually say, maybe, but most likely yes.  So, the apartment below theirs opened up and we decided to take it.  After a lot of worry about selling our contract in our old apartment (which was a most needless gesture as we had nearly 20 couples come look at our place in 5 days and at least three couples applied for the apartment) we sold the contract and started packing up.

Here is what our apartment looked like as we showed it:

Luckily for us, our friends were away in Hawaii on vacation for the 10 days before the move and allowed us to put our stuff in their apartment until we could actually move in.  That was incredibly helpful as we packed away most of our little stuff before the day of the move.

The day of the move came and boy were we busy!  We had to pick up our friends from the Salt Lake Airport and then had to start the move.  We were fortunate to have a lot of help including a person from Ashley's work who brought his truck and my home teaching companion who offered his van.  With their vehicles and the help of my brother and three of our friends and a couple of brothers of Kayla's, we managed to complete the moving in 1 hour!  Then we had to do the cleaning as we had to be out of the apartment by 5 PM.  With the help of Steven and one of Kayla's brothers, we had the apartment cleaned and locked right at 5 PM.

Here was our last look at the place we had lived (at least one of us) for 20 months:

It was sad to leave the place but we were excited for our new place.  We still miss some of the cooler things about the old place like the step-up pantry but our new place is wonderful too!

We came back to our new place around 5:30 and had a huge pile of stuff in our living room!  We spent most of that night to start organizing things.  By Tuesday evening, our place looked like this:

Even though we had work on Tuesday, we worked hard that evening and had the kitchen done, the dining table and desk set up and some things in our second bedroom assembled, but we still had a large pile in the living room.

We had set a goal to finish organizing the house by Wednesday night as my birthday was on Thursday and we were going to host a few friends (more on that in another blog).  With the help of Steven and Kayla, who kindly helped us again that night, our place was finished!  Here is the finished product with a picture of the happy workers:

We are excited to live here and have enjoyed every day!  I hope you enjoy the pictures as well!