Victory, or at least that one small first step

So, while final victory would be getting the house in Belfair sold and being happily settled into our very own mostly bank-owned house here in the Tri-Cities, today I reduced my stress load a little bit and dropped off an application for an apartment.  A few short hours later, I was called and told we had been approved for the apartment....Yay!

Early on, I was worried I may have come across as a bit of a smart ass.  Being 100% totally serious, I had asked the girl, ornamental fixture, attractive young leasing agent if I could just write them a check for 6 months rent now to save myself the $35 dollar application fee.  She just looked kind of confused for a few seconds and said she wasn't sure, but maybe she could boot it up the corporate chain, but that would take longer than running the application screening.  Fine..besides, if I do the math, my money might make more in interest than I would have saved paying it all now. 

The apartment complex, showing here: http://www.ryapt.com/jadstev/ , is nothing special, in fact, it is kind of tired, and not very shiny, but that is what my wife and I were talking about wanting.  It is $100 a month cheaper than anything else available(and non rent controlled) on the Richland side of things, and VERY conveniently located.  Our hope is to only be in the apartment 6 months...it might drag a little longer depending on how long it takes to sell the house in Belfair, and then find and close on a place here...but it was never intended that we end up in an apartment long term. As such, our standard kept going back to the first apartment we rented as a married couple in Poulsbo, Washington...clean, maintained, and a dry roof over our head, with no eminent signs of disrepair or peeling paint. 

From the floor plan, it looks like it has a fair amount of storage space, but IT IS roughly half the size of our house, so we feel that even with some of the purging and downsizing we have been doing, we will probably need to rent a storage unit at some point.  For this reason, I had done some checking into three bedroom apartments, planning to just use the extra room for storage, but there was NOTHING available in Richland, and even across the bridge in Pasco a three bedroom was going to be into the 4-digit a month range, more than we wanted to tie up for rent. 

Now all we have to do is get a showing for our place in Belfair, and my moral will be picking up nicely.