Our first apartment

In February the hubs and I took a quick weekend trip up to Atlantic City, NJ to cheer on one of our friends who is an aspiring UFC fighter. On the way up the shore we met with our real estate agent for our first big meeting and then decided to stop for lunch in Newark, DE. Being that I went to grad school at the University of Delaware, I wanted to poke around Main Street and see if anything had changed in the past few years (it had!).

On our trip, we drove by our old apartment complex, the site of our first step into cohabitation. Also the site where the hubs firmly entrenched himself in the, "I'll spend the rest of my life with you and share everything, except for the hamper" weird stance that he has going on. More importantly, our old apartment complex is completely different. When we lived there it was a sketchy place of regular ol' folks and poor college students, complete with a murderous backstory. Seriously, a female student was murdered there the year before we moved in (hence why we got two dogs ASAP, jk) and we found out later watching Animal Planet that years ago another resident was eaten by his illegal giant lizards. SWEET!!!

Now the complex is "Green" and is solely off-campus housing for students. It also has this massive community center with a full-length basketball course, 3-D private screening room, bar, and tanning beds. Clearly the Jersey Shore influence has migrated south into Newark!

It was kind of a throwback for the hubs and I to think of that first apartment and how the only new pieces of furniture we bought when we moved in were a tv stand, coffee table, kitchen table & chairs, and a breakfast table. They all came from Ikea and the breakfast table doubled as a great beer pong table. Yeah, that's how grad school rolls. The rest of our furniture was all hand-me-downs or leftovers from college.

Here's the floor plan for that old 855 square foot apartment.

Don't let the floor plan fool you. There was no way in heck a dining table fit in the "dining area." We kept the table over in the "study." However, the kitchen was just as tiny as it looked. We couldn't have our microwave, toaster, and coffee pot all plugged in at the same time.

It wasn't a total waste. Jax actually ate a 6 x 6 inch hole right dab in the middle of the living room carpet. I patched the spot, extremely poorly, with carpet from the closet and then replaced the carpet in the closet with the closest Berber carpet I could find at Home Depot. Then, the apartment complex still gave us the pet deposit back after we moved out! After all of the disgusting things we saw while we lived there, I'm not surprised if we weren't "tenants of the year."

It kind of sucks to look back at it because everything in the apartment itself was new, so it could have been a really nice place. However, the sketchy people living next door, their annoying 50lb mutt who attacked Jewels, and most people's total disregard for common decency made the place into a dump. It's funny to see it now.

I tell you what, the pool certainly did NOT look like that when we were there!