Our current lease runs out at the end of this month. For the last several months, we'd been contemplating whether we wanted to stay in our current apartment or move to a new neighborhood in Seattle. We've used our neighborhood explorations to evaluate different areas and figured out which ones we liked the most and would ever want to live in. We also had been thinking about buying a condo instead of renting an apartment. Having a little more space would be nice, especially in the bedroom.

However, we didn't feel that strongly about moving to another area and I like where we are pretty well already since it's really close to my work. We ended up just being lazy and didn't seriously look at any condos or apartments. The timing wasn't ideal either since we were gone for two weeks and wouldn't have had much time once we got back to find a new place and move.

When we got back from Australia, we had an offer under our door saying we could keep our current rental rate and they'd give us a complimentary carpet cleaning. So we decided to renew the lease for 16 months (the longest we could make it) and locked in our rate. We'll probably make a couple of improvements to our place soon, like getting a new clock, adding more light to the living room, and rearranging things in our cupboards to use our space better.