So far, every time I've been looking for a place to live, as soon as I've found the right place, I know it. (There is a possible exception for Philadelphia, but I did know the right roommate as soon as I met her, so that counts for something.)

In Prescott, the very first place I looked at was the one. It hadn't even been listed officially, if I remember correctly - just pure luck that I found it. We looked at five or six more apartments, just to be sure, but came right back to the first one. We'd had a number of failed attempts before we found our house in Burlington, but almost as soon as we stepped in the door we knew it was ours.

So as I've been apartment hunting over the past week, I've been (mostly unconsciously) waiting for that same thing to happen. And I've seen a lot of places in the past week, several of which were quite nice. But none of them were home. (Several of which were not quite nice and emphatically not home.)

We had two appointments on Sunday. One was for a three-bedroom with garage (our grouchy diesel makes that a priority) about 20 minutes out of town, in our price range; the other a two-bedroom without garage, five minutes out of town, on the extreme outside edge of our price range but with a garden space. The first was emphatically not nice, and not home: no light, no counterspace, really no kitchen space, generally dingy and all three bedrooms too small to fit our bed in. We left discouraged, and I made a call for a second appointment with one of the nice-but-not-home apartments, because at least it was nice.

But then we got to the second place. And - it was perfect. Just enough space for the two of us, a gas range (hard to find in this neck of the woods), good windows, a workshop area for J's homebrew and other projects, and garden space - an acre's worth! And we can get chickens! And we can get pets if we want! And the landlady has a policy of deducting $100 off the rent in May so you can buy flower and vegetable seeds! And she suggested we could barter landscaping/building a woodfired bread oven/other awesome projects for rent. And the place just felt good.

Home.


(We don't get to move in 'til March, but once we do I'll finally have somewhere to put all that nesting energy!)