When we moved to this apartment back in February, one of the things we missed was the ability to compost like we did at our previous apartment. However, the city of Seattle has required all apartment buildings to offer composting, so now we can compost again. The apartment building also provided us a bin to put our compostables in, something that would have been nice to have had at our old place. It will take a few days before I get back in the habit, but it will be nice not to waste all the vegetable scraps we create and tea bags we go through.

So we've been in our new apartment for a over a month now. Our boxes have all been out of the way for a few weeks and while there is some furniture and other decorations that we're interested in, we're completely settled in now.

I'd say that living in a new place has been a nice change with some minor advantages and drawbacks. The larger size of the unit was one reason we moved, and while the layout is not as ideal as at our older, smaller apartment, the bigger living area and separate bedroom is nice. The way we have things arranged makes it so that we eat at our dining table a lot more than we did at our old place, so that's kind of nice.

I did like getting the afternoon sun at our old place, and we haven't gotten as much sunlight in our unit here, but that's more due to the weather. When the sun is out, we get enough light in here. Our view isn't as great as from our old place, and there are other apartments across the alley so we do keep our blinds closed more often.

The office staff and maintenance here have been good and things have been taken care of quickly.

While I'd rather not have to use our heater, standing in front of the heater is a nice way to warm up.

The bathroom is small, but we've found a pretty good way to organize everything and Lesley has gotten used to the size. The washer and dryer are smaller than at our old place, so she has been doing laundry a lot more often here.

We do like our new neighborhood. I really like the historic residential area immediately around us. Also, I've enjoyed being able to walk to the grocery store and we haven't had any problems with that. The main commercial streets nearby aren't particularly clean, but there are lots of places to eat along them and we've barely tried any so far. The nicer weather that will be coming up will hopefully give us more of a chance to explore our neighborhood, so I'm looking forward to that.

Our commutes to work aren't substantially different. Lesley's walk is a little longer, but my overall commute time is a little shorter. Most of our walk is through downtown, so that makes it more interesting, though more difficult to jaywalk. The walk home from the bus for me has been a little annoying because the signals aren't synced particularly well.

Overall, there's nothing too different about living here versus at our old place, and it's just kind of fun living somewhere different.

Every weekend morning, we have the privilege of sleeping in later than we do during the week. Unfortunately, our new place has crows outside the window, so their obnoxious calls are the first thing we hear as we are woken up. There aren't any trees directly in front of our window, but there are some trees in the area, so there must be some crows nests nearby. These birds are probably more annoying than the recording studio was outside of our old place, because at least the recording studio didn't interrupt our sleep.

Anyway, I suppose the birds were here before I was, but their calls are really quite annoying, so it would be nice if there were something legal and ethical I could do about it. I've heard of using lasers to drive away birds, but I don't know exactly where the birds are to shine the lasers at, so I'm not sure that would work (or be legal). I also think a hawk could be effective at chasing the crows off, but I don't exactly have any birds of prey of my own. And shotgun blasts or other loud noises are probably out of the question, as they would annoy the neighbors.

So, I don't know if we have to resign ourselves to getting earplugs or just dealing with it, but I'm not sure what else we can do about it.

Besides decorating our place, we've also been wanting to find some new furniture for the dining area and living room.

• Dining room chairs - We only had two chairs for our dining table, so we knew we had to buy at least two more to have enough seating since our families are coming to visit us in a few months. We weren't really crazy about our current chairs. I wanted to get a whole new set, but so far we hadn't found anything that we like much at all. We eventually decided to go back to IKEA to get some chairs that would match with our table. They're a little bigger and heavier than our other two and they go fairly well together. It will have to be a temporary solution until we find a full set that we like. We probably won't be looking again for a while though.


• Wine rack/pantry - I also would like a wine rack/pantry so that we would have a place to store our wine and put extra food. Currently our cabinets are really full of food and we don't have much room to store everything. It would also be nice if it had a shelf we could put our microwave on so it doesn't have to take up space on the kitchen counter. I haven't had any luck finding something that could satisfy all three requirements though.


• Clock - We want a new clock for the living room. We have a small blue one that I've had forever, but we want a bigger, nicer one. We found a cool one at Kasala that Troy liked a lot. It was a little expensive though and required two D batteries to operate. We haven't found anything else we like as much as that one.


• Entertainment center - We also want a new entertainment center for the TV, DVD collection, and gaming systems. We are still using my old small cabinet that doesn't have much space in it for anything. The bottom drawer is actually a file drawer, so we haven't been able to put much of anything but files in there. We haven't seriously looked into our options yet.


• End table - I would like a new end table to put next to the couch. The one we have is really small and low to the ground. It would be nice to get a matching coffee table and two end tables, but I'm not sure when we'll find something we like.


• Patio furniture - Eventually we'll be getting patio furniture for our deck so we can sit outside in the summer.

Much lower on the list is a new comforter set for our bed, a better couch with more support and foot rests, and even new bedroom furniture. I'm sure a lot of that will have to wait a while.

One of the features that helped convince me to move into our old apartment building was that it was a LEED certified building. Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) certification verifies that a building is constructed in a way that achieves "energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts."

One benefit of this is that LEED certified buildings are healthier to be in, use less energy, and cost less to operate. The benefit to us at our old apartment was that we hardly ever used our heater and that our appliances cost less to use.

Our current apartment building was constructed a couple decades earlier, so it's not as efficient. Our unit is also larger, so there's more air that needs to be kept warm in the winter. And we face east, so we don't get the afternoon sun to keep us warm. All that means that we are using our heater a lot more than at our old place. At our old place, we needed to turn our heater on for about one week out of the entire year. At our current place, we're running the heater pretty much every day.

Also, the washer and drier at our current apartment are about half the size or 2/3 the size of our old ones, so we're having to run them a lot more often. We do have a deck, so we may look at drying some things outside in the summer.

Anyway, we've now gotten our first electric bill here and our energy use per day is about 75% more than what we used at our old place - we're using about 14 kWh per day instead of the 8 kWH we used at our old place. Fortunately, we'll be using our heater less in the coming months so our energy use should decrease. Also, our energy only costs about 4.6 cents per kWh, so electricity still isn't going to be much more than $30 per month.

We've been trying to figure out how to decorate our new apartment since we moved in. Decorating isn't really mine or Troy's strong suit, so it's been time consuming trying to figure out what we like and where to find it. The walls were generally blank until last weekend.

One big difference between this apartment and our old one is that we have a long white wall behind the couch that extends into the dining area. It's at least 20 feet long. We were thinking of buying some art or a mirror or something to take up some of the space. Then we realized that it would take a long time to find exactly what we want, so we figured we should put up something in the meantime. We hung some of our pictures we've taken from our vacations including Australia and Hawaii. The other two pictures are of Hurricane Ridge and Mount Rainier. We still have a big wall space behind the couch to fill though. We might go back to a place we've looked before called Kasala to buy a mirror for behind the couch.

We painted the other main wall in the living room a light green color, which is nice because all the other walls are white. We hung up our framed Hawaiian hale drawing and we also bought a set of 24 leaves we could position on the wall in whatever way we wanted. The leaves are a brown color, which looks good against the green wall. We hung them on top and to the left of our door out to the deck in a way that it looks like they're being blown down from the top of the door.

Hopefully we can find more things to put on the walls as decoration soon. Maybe we'll buy some new 8x10 pictures from our trip to the Oregon coast to replace Hurricane Ridge and Mount Rainier. So far I think we've made a lot of progress, especially for having moved in barely 3 weeks ago.

We had a microwave already installed above the stove in our old apartment, but our current apartment doesn't have one. We asked if we could install our own above the stove, but the manager said it would be a lot of work and we realized how expensive they are. Then they said they would let us borrow a microwave, so we said sure.

The one they lent to us was old, dirty, and pretty small. We used it a few times and made a few bags on popcorn in it. It left several more kernels un-popped than the microwave at our old apartment, which was annoying. So, I decided to buy our own and we went looking a few weeks ago.

We found one at Best Buy that we really liked and got good reviews, but they only had a black version in the store. I wanted white so it would match the rest of our appliances. So we had to order it special delivery online. I ordered it Feb 26th and it arrived this last Wednesday. I had to meet the delivery guy at the apartment, which was a little annoying, but I'm glad we have a new microwave now. We popped our first bag of popcorn in it the night we got it and it turned out great.

We couldn't use the heaters at our old apartment because we blocked them with furniture. Our bed area was so small that the bed covered up the vent and our bookcase was in the way of the heater in the living area. We only needed to run them maybe a week or so out of the whole year anyway, so it wasn't a big deal.

But now at our new place, we are able to keep the heaters free since we have more room. It's been cold lately too, so we've had to use them quite a bit. Our new building doesn't seem as well insulated as old our apartment building either, so I'm curious to see how much our electric bill will go up. We've been running the heat daily. They generate some pretty hot air, which is nice to sit in front of if I'm cold. Hopefully it will get a little warmer soon so we don't have to run it as much.

One of the more time consuming things about moving is that we had to clean our old apartment. I was off work last Monday for President's Day, so I was able to get a lot of cleaning done. I went over there around noon and worked for about four hours. The place was dirtier than I thought. I started by vacuuming everywhere, even around the baseboards. Then I cleaned the bathroom, including all the drawers and the bathtub.

After that I moved into the kitchen and started cleaning the refrigerator. We had magnets on it that had left a black residue, so I had to clean that off. The vegetable drawers were also dirty, but I could pull those out and clean them easily in the sink. The microwave wasn't too bad since we had cleaned it fairly recently. And I didn't bother trying to clean the drip pans because they're so bad it would take at least an hour to scrub the grime off. I tried to clean them once before and they never did come completely clean. We'll just pay for new ones. That's pretty much where I stopped.

Then on Saturday we cleaned the kitchen counters, sink, and under the sink. Troy also took down all the stuff from the walls, including our curtains and all the nails. It was pretty hard to take the curtains down though because we didn't have anything to stand on. Troy had to get up on the windowsill to reach, which looked difficult. It took another couple hours to get everything completely out and cleaned. We didn't have time to clean the oven because the self-cleaning feature would have taken over four hours. Unfortunately it costs $25 for the apartments to clean it for us, which means our deposit will be even less than I was hoping for.

It felt weird to be in our empty old apartment. Here are some pictures of it while we were packing, moving, and after it was all emptied. We'll miss it.

After three years of living in our original apartment we found when we first moved to Seattle, we started looking for a new apartment. We made a list of what we liked and didn't like about our old apartment and neighborhood and decided it would be a good idea to move. Our lease would have increased at our old place anyway, so it was good we had already resigned ourselves to moving.

Moving was a lot of work, but everything worked out well and we've put almost everything away. We really like having more space in the living room and an actual bedroom. The location is great and is still within walking distance to my work. It's actually a shorter bus ride for Troy from his work too. It's even a little cheaper than what we were paying for our old place. And we're about a 6 minute walk from the grocery store and tons of restaurants. The main drawback is that the bathroom is tiny and there isn't much storage or counter space. Otherwise I think we're pretty happy with it and are looking forward to making it feel more like home. Here are some pictures of the new apartment, during the move and after.

Here's a video tour:

First Hill Apartment on Vimeo.

We're finally mostly settled in our new apartment. Last week and weekend was really busy with all the packing we had to do to get ready. Thankfully we still had most of the boxes we used to move here, including four big wardrobe boxes and boxes for our kitchen dishware and appliances. We signed the lease on Thursday and moved in some small things that night and Friday night.

We had originally wanted to have the movers come Saturday morning around 8 or 8:30, but our old apartment wouldn't give us the elevator key to use because the office didn't open until 10. So we ended up changing our move time to the afternoon, which had a big start window of 12-4. We used Gentle Giant, which I read good things about and checked on the BBB website. It ended up working out well that they came later because we were still busy packing up things and getting furniture emptied. Three big, strong guys showed up at the old apartment around 12 and took about an hour and a half to get everything padded, wrapped, and in the truck. I was impressed with how fast and hard they worked.

The only thing that got broken was a cheap picture frame that fell off the wall when they were lifting the mattress. To compensate, they didn't charge us for the packing materials used to wrap the mattress (which we weren't told about in the beginning, but I guess it didn't matter). It seemed to take longer for them to move everything into the new place. The couch looked especially difficult to fit through the door. They ended up finishing around 3:45.

After they left, we spent the next several days unpacking and putting things away. The place was quite a mess for a few days with boxes everywhere. We still have some piles of stuff here and there that we don't know what to do with or where to put, but it's starting to look like a home now. We hope to have some pictures up by this weekend.

We're finally moving this weekend after several weeks of searching for the right apartment, packing, getting rid of stuff we don't want, and waiting until the big day. We'll be able to move in small things and boxes Thursday and Friday. Then the movers will move the bigger furniture Saturday sometime between 12 and 4. The forecast currently looks very favorable for Saturday: sunny skies with 0% chance of rain, while all the surrounding days have a chance of rain/snow. Hopefully the move goes smoothly!

Last weekend we started going through stuff trying to reduce what we have. We have a lot of stuff from when we were kids that we can't really get rid of, like school yearbooks and stuffed animals. We got rid of a lot of clothes we never wear in preparation for going down to 5' of closet space in our bedroom. We'll have to store more clothes in the chest of drawers, which we've been using to store random stuff. It was quite a mess in the apartment with all our boxes out in the hallway and living room.

We're planning on packing a lot more stuff this weekend, our last full weekend in our current apartment. It's kind of sad to be leaving it, after being there almost three years. We'll miss being close to Whole Foods and REI. We'll also miss the view we have of Queen Anne Hill and the sunset to the west, even though it is partially blocked by Amazon buildings.

We'll probably go out to eat at a few more places nearby before we move. I want to order take out from Laadla Indian restaurant again and we might to go Seastar this weekend. I'd also like to walk to Lake Union Park again.

It's definitely become our home, but I guess it's time to move on. Our new place will be bigger and cheaper. It's also in an area we aren't very familiar with, so we'll get to explore a whole new neighborhood and try out all the restaurants in the area.

As we look forward to moving into our new place, we're trying to think of where we want to put all of our furniture and how we want to decorate. The place we're moving into has white paint over the walls and kitchen cabinets, so we want to add a little touch of color by painting a wall in a different color. We've never had anything painted before, so we're picking up color swatches and trying to figure out what color we want to use.

We're thinking of a shade of green, as everything else is very neutral - the walls are white, the carpet is brown-ish, and the closet doors are grey. There are so many different shades of green, though. Our current color scheme has some green in it, so we want the wall to match. I don't want the wall to be too grey-colored, because we get plenty of that from the sky. I think a green with some yellow in it would be nice, but we don't want it to be an olive color. So, we're going to go back to the unit and see what shades of green would look best.

We're also thinking of painting parts of other rooms like the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom, but I don't know if we'll do that. At our current apartment, the bathroom is already painted in a neutral tan color, which I think helps the feel of the room. So, anyway, hopefully we pick a good color for the living room and any other rooms - there are a lot of options.

After weeks of searching and visiting 14 different buildings, we finally applied for a new apartment. We thought we found "the one" last week in a building on First Hill, but it was gone before we could apply. Then Thursday night, we thought we'd found "the one" in a building on 8th Ave. But yesterday, we ended up applying for another unit in that first building on First Hill. While this unit isn't as big as we had hoped for, it's still bigger than what we have now and costs less than what we're paying now.

This wasn't in the plan - as of Thursday night we expected to apply to a building on 8th Avenue that we saw that day. It had the best floor plan of any that we'd seen, including plenty of storage space, and the building had a super amazing rooftop deck with a view of downtown, Mount Rainier, and the Cascades to the east. However, we found out later that the unit we'd be getting would be smaller than the unit we'd seen on Thursday. We also found out that the first apartment building on First Hill we had tried to apply to last week still had a unit available, though it was smaller than the one we'd tried to apply to, it was about the same size of the unit we'd be getting on 8th Ave and much cheaper.

After some analysis and discussion throughout the day on Friday, we decided to take a look at the less expensive unit on First Hill. It's not the ideal floor plan, as there is not as much bathroom counter space and storage as we wanted, but the living room is much bigger than what we have now. We also have a better view from this unit than we would have had at any other place we'd looked at (though not nearly as good as what we have now). I also like the location better, as we're close to downtown, close to the grocery store, and in a rather quiet residential area.

We applied for that unit and then returned home to find a note under our door that our current rent would increase 7% if we wanted to sign a new lease where we are now. So, that helped to reaffirm our decision. We're excited to be done with the searching and looking forward to moving into our new home.

Our lease ends next month and we are looking for a larger apartment. We really like our current apartment building, but we have decided that we want more room in the bedroom and living room. Ideally, we'd like a little more space but without paying a lot more.

There's not a lot available in our current building and what is available seems to cost a lot more. We've spent the last few weeks looking up available apartments on HotPads and PadMapper. Things are a little difficult because we have very strict criteria. We'd like to stay within reasonable walking distance to downtown and Lesley's work. That rules out a few neighborhoods we like, like Ballard and the U District, but I think we would quickly tire of a longer commute. Specifically, we're looking at apartments in upper Belltown, Capitol Hill, and First Hill. We want a one bedroom apartment in good condition without being too pricey.

We had found a place that we liked and almost applied for it, but it was leased right before we got there to submit the application. So, we are still looking for a place we would like. We have to give notice by early February to our current apartments if we are planning to move out by the end of the month. If we can't find anything, we may sign another 6 month lease here or go month-to-month until we find something.

With our lease ending in February, we're going to be deciding soon whether to renew our lease or to move elsewhere. In the years since we've moved here, this location has grown on me and overall I'm pretty satisfied with the neighborhood and the apartment building itself.

Things I like about our apartment

The positive impressions we had when we moved in were pretty spot-on and there is still a lot to like.

1. There are no major complaints - the neighbors are fine, it's pretty quiet overall, and there are no regular inconveniences or other issues.


2. Our unit was designed well and makes good use of the space. For being only 555 square feet, the kitchen and bathrooms are adequately sized.


3. The apartment building is pretty nice. People respect the public spaces and the apartment keeps things in good condition.


4. Even though we lost the best part of our view, we can still see some mountains, Queen Anne Hill, and quite a bit of sky.


5. I love the afternoon sun that comes in and brightens up the place


6. We almost never have to use our heater (which is good because we have furniture blocking it right now). It's nice that we usually get enough heat from surrounding units during the winter and can use our windows to cool things off most of the rest of the year.


7. We can compost our food scraps. Maybe this is available in all apartments, I don't know, but it's nice to be able to do it.


8. Our trash and recycling room is just down the hall.

Things I don't like about our apartment

1. The grill on the balcony below us puts smoke in our apartment if we have our window open. This is very annoying on a nice day when we want to feel the cooler outside air.


2. The balcony below us can get kind of loud if there's a party, or people at nearby clubs and bars. Also, the recording studio across the alley is really annoying.


3. It would be nice if some rooms were bigger, particularly the bedroom.


4. We face the west and it does get warm in here for about a week or two every summer.


5. We've had to add some lights to get it to be bright enough in here, as there are not enough light fixtures built into the unit.

Things I like about our neighborhood

The neighborhood has changed and improved since we moved in. Now that some workers in Amazon's headquarters have moved in this year, more restaurants have opened and there is more to walk to in the area. Check out this color-coded view of the area from the Space Needle.

1. It's nice to have some restaurants and retail within walking distance. We try to take advantage of it when we can. Also, Whole Foods is nearby.


2. We're about a 15 minute walk from downtown, which is convenient for Lesley's work and if we want to go downtown to shop or eat or run errands. This is a lot more convenient than having to drive downtown or take a bus like most people do.


3. Lake Union Park opened late this summer and is one of Seattle's great urban parks. Even though the weather got cooler and wetter right after it opened, we've been there several times already.


4. We are close to several bus routes that can take us to many parts of the city, at least in the northern part of Seattle. For going to any neighborhood north of here, we can get to a bus pretty easily and I enjoy doing that on the weekends.


5. The farmers market outside our building is a fun place to buy fruit and flowers, among many other things, though it may not continue next year.

Things I don't like about our neighborhood

1. It's a 10 minute walk to Whole Foods, which isn't that far, but the walk is across a busy street and up a hill. It would be nice to live closer to somewhere where we could regularly shop for more affordable groceries.


2. The streets that surround this area are a deterrent to walking.


3. While there is a lot to walk to in this area, there aren't as many places to walk to as I would like. Few other Seattle neighborhoods are more walkable, though.


4. Being a neglected mostly-industrial part of town for decades means that it will take some time for this area to feel have a cozy neighborhood feel that other areas have.

It will be hard to find a new place with as many positives as where we live now, but we're planning to look into our options and will see what we can find.

Seattle City Light sends out a newsletter bimonthly with news and tips for saving energy and recycling electronics among other things. This issue detailed where our electricity comes from:

• Hydro - 91.2%


• Nuclear - 4.4%


• Wind - 2.3%


• Coal - 1.4%


• Other - 0.7%

Our apartment had their annual holiday party this past week and we decided to go. There were some finger foods and drinks, however we showed up late, so some of the food was cold or already eaten. There was also a raffle for several prizes that were donated by local businesses. There were quite a lot of other people there, but Lesley and me were each lucky enough to win a prize.

I won a free pizza from Tutta Bella and Lesley won two free tickets to the Cinerama.

We had our free pizza with a calzone this weekend and we had been wanting to go to the Cinerama since it was remodeled, so we're looking forward to seeing a movie there sometime soon.

The Seattle Public Library has Kill-A-Watt's to borrow. A Kill-A-Watt is a device that you can plug other electronic devices into and it will tell you how much electrical power it uses. I've known about these for a while, but it's not relly worth buying at around $25, so it's really nice that they can be rented from the library.

Over the past several days, I've been plugging all of our electronics into it to see how much power they consume. While electricity is very inexpensive here at around $0.05 per kWh, it's still cool to know how much electricity our electronics are using.

We weren't able to measure any high-voltage appliances, but certainly our refrigerator and oven use a lot of electricity. Of the appliances we were able to measure, our microwave and vacuum use the most power when in use, but we don't use them very often, so they don't account for a very large portion of our electrical consumption.

I was most interested in finding out how much standby power our devices used when turned off. Over time, these phantom loads from TVs, microwaves, and video game systems can add up to quite a lot of power. Some estimates are that standby power costs Americans $3 billion annually and accounts for as much as 10% of residential electrical consumption.

We found that the biggest things that steal electricity when not in use our CD player (particularly the clock), computer equipment (especially the modem and router), and our cable box. In fact, somehow just the clock on our CD player uses more power than our laptop does when powered on.

Contrary to things we'd heard, many things didn't use electricity when not in use - our cell phone chargers and other electronics chargers didn't show any electric consumption when our devices weren't charging.

Now that we have a better understanding of how much electricity our things use, we'll try to make better decisions about how we use them. For example, it's not very hard to switch off our surge protectors at night when we're not using them, and in doing so we could save over 10% off of our annual electricity bills (we only spend around $157 annually anyway). We'll also likely keep our CD player clock off now that we know how much power it wastes.

Anyway, it's cool that we were able to borrow the Kill A Watt from the library and now we're a little more educated on how we're using electricity.