Image This is one of the views from our suite.  I love that we live in an area not crammed full of condos so close you could almost reach out to touch your neighbor’s balcony.

ImageI also love the little park we overlook with the pond where the ducks & geese love to land in their migrations north & south.  I like that I see an occasional bunny hopping across our parking lot to go into the park area for the night.

I like the layout of our apartment – because we are on a corner we have windows on 2 sides & get beautiful cross ventilation.  Because we’re on a corner our suite isn’t laid out with all the rooms along one long hallway, but rather flow into each other.  We have in-suite laundry & 2 full bathrooms (so hubby & I don’t have to share unless we have company), a walk-in closet & large bedrooms.  We are as far from the elevator as you can get & still be in the building, so we don’t get the annoying noises to deal with.  Since we’re at the end of the hallway, no one needs to walk by our door except for our next door neighbor who has the other corner suite & is very quiet.  Our apartment fits into our budget neatly & is very comfortable.  But there are problems . . .

When we came to look at the apartment we were assured it was a mostly adult building which turned out later to not be true.  It wasn’t so bad at first because most of the children were on the 1st & 2nd floors, so they really didn’t bother us unless they were horsing around in the parking lot & that didn’t happen too often.  But now the suite 2 doors down from us has children (I think they may have just had another baby because there were lots of people coming & going in the hallways over the last couple of weeks & standing around in the hallway talking & laughing – almost partying).

Our apartment also faces south west, so it gets very warm & for some reason in Alberta, apartments don’t come with air conditioning.  In Manitoba, unless you’re renting a dive apartment, every apartment comes with air conditioning.  Luckily, we have cross ventilation – but if we leave the blinds open we can’t see the TV because of the bright sunlight till late at night.  I hate Daylight Savings Time!

Another problem we have is our very controlling Condo Association.  We received a letter from the condo association in mid Feb. telling us we had to take down our Christmas lights by the end of Feb. or we would be fined.  Thankfully it was not a cold winter, so it didn’t pose a big hardship to take the lights down, but we had spent a great deal of time & effort carefully planning how to light our balcony so it was tasteful & pretty.  This is when my husband first said the M (for moving) word.

Another problem – someone on the main floor has rented their condo to a drug dealer & we are getting a lot of unsavory characters hanging around our building now.  Also the smell of marijuana in the hallways is enough to choke you most days when you cross through the lobby.  What’s worse, when the weather was cool, they would disable the smoke alarms in the stairwells & smoke there, causing the alarms to go off & the fire department to have to come out & clear the building.  When you’ve evacuated your apartment a few times in the winter, you get a little tired of it.

And today was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  My hubby arrived home with a bill from the management company for over $150.00 for the lights in our kitchen.  They charged us for changing the flourescent bulbs in our kitchen.  We did not ask them to change the bulbs, we asked them to fix the actual fixtures which were not working properly.  Further, they charged us because I asked the handyman to show me how to get the drain plug out of the drain in my tub because it was blocked with hair & we couldn’t figure out how to do it.  You can’t just screw the stopper off to get at the drain, you have to take tools & pliers to do this.

So now hubby is mad & is even more determined to move than ever.  He’s busy looking up rentals on the computer & printing out places for us to start looking at.  I can see his point, but I really love my apartment & my view.  It’s going to be very difficult to find what we have here again.  Having said that, we may find something better, but maybe not.  So I might as well get resigned to moving yet again.