Housing, Apartments, and Dorms

When planning for Canada, I knew I would be sharing a room. The school was nice enough to provide a bed, nightstand, desk, and cupboard space for each of the kids they accepted. Each room also had their own bathroom... Fairly sweet set-up when compared to the University next to us that had to share a bathroom between about 20 people!

Oh goodness.

Well that left us with having to buy very little by all means furniture wise. So my only crisis was picking out a bedspread, which at the time I didn't even care about. I was just worried about my parents leaving me in this strange place filled with moose. (I've actually never did see one, shame eh.)

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Anyways, so as you can see we were all flying high in Canada. Now fast forward two years and I've stepped onto American soil and a completely new ballgame. As I've mentioned before, my new University does not provide dorms of any sort, rather they help us find an apartment around the area. They provided pretty precise booklets that listed price, size, distance.. pretty much anything relevant. That booklet completely saved my life, as did YouTube. No joke. Guys YouTube is also good for finding little videos on apartment complexes, who knew.

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So! After finding a perfect apartment, I also found a great roommate and I was set! Moving to the States was pretty easy, I just packed basically every article of clothing I owned into three very large suitcases (maybe not every article) and hopped on a plane with my family. Arriving at the completely bare apartment was a breath of fresh air, I could for the first time in my life decide every last bit of detail in my room and kitchen and dining area. It was crazy.

IKEA became my best friend. Not going to lie. Target had some pretty sweet deals on desks at the time too. But IKEA is like crazy amazing. I think that was my first time in that store, and it blew me away. I wish they had a better online shopping thing going on, but oh well, it's probably for the better hey.

My tips for moving into an apartment? Make sure you have a good means of transportation for moving everything in. I mean IKEA is pretty sweet making a bed fit in a tiny little box, but you can't always count on that. And buy some tools! You'll find a few things around the house might need fixing up. Make a list, and if your apartment's management is as amazing as ours they'll send someone over to deal with it. And at the end of your term you won't have to pay for things you didn't break! Win win right? Above all! Plan out and keep track of all the things you've bought. Especially if you were like me and moving into a brand new empty space, new University and all that jazz.. your going to be buying a ton of stuff. Make sure it all fits! Put love in the space yeah :)

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