Onto Bigger & Better Things
So when I left off, we were depressed, tired, and hungry…oh yeah and it was raining…and cold.
Although wet and a little dreary, downtown Rapid City was a bright spot in our day. The adorable area was lined with cute little shops and fun restaurants, and was pleasantly reminiscent of downtown Asheville, except the streets were wider. I guess because there is so much land out here there is no need to cram anything into a small space. All of the streets are wide.
But I digress.
We didn’t walk around much given the weather, and went to the Firehouse Brewing Co for dinner. A beer was more than necessary at this point. Our stuff was being delivered in just over 24 hours, we weren’t sure if we were locked into the lease for the unit we simply couldn’t imagine living in, and all we wanted was to be “home”.
We actually didn’t talk very much during dinner.
Back at the hotel I emailed the leasing agent and explained our disappointment and concern that even our smaller furniture wouldn’t fit in our assigned unit. I asked for our options. And then we waited.
The next morning, I emailed again to ask if we could view one of the duplex or stand alone units. Then we waited.
I did laundry. We visited the Base Exchange and then grabbed sushi at the Commissary for lunch. While at the Commissary I received the response that there were no duplexes or stand alones available, did we want our unit or not? If not she would let it go.
That response rubbed us a little wrong. Of course we were exhausted in just about every way you could be at that point so I’m sure our patience was close to non-existent.
I am not very good at conflict, and typically not quick enough on my feet to speak my mind effectively (I so much prefer to write for this reason). Husband on the other hand is good at all of those things (I suppose that is why he is a lawyer). So he took charge and called our leasing agent.
Come to find out, the unit we looked at was not our unit, we had been reassigned to a different address (thanks for telling us! The movers now had the wrong address!). She gave us the new address and told us to give it a look, and in the mean time she would look into anything else that was available and we could discuss at our meeting that afternoon. We had a pre-existing appointment set with her for 3:30 that day where we were supposed to have resigned our lease and done the pre-move in inspection.
We drove by the new address and had essentially the same reaction.
Getting to the leasing office we sat down, nerves on edge. No we didn’t care for the other address anymore than the previous one, yes we wanted to upgrade. She requested for her assistant to pull anything that might be open in the duplexes or stand alones, and ALAS! There happened to be ONE duplex available. It was a South Dakota miracle!
She grabbed the keys and we went to check it out. The street alone was a marked improvement over the previous neighborhood. The homes looked a little more taken care of, and our backyard, although still a little small, was bigger and even had a shed. It’s obvious that this development hasn’t been renovated in quite some time, so everything in general is dated, but we were happy to find that at least the inside seemed clean and spacious enough to house our furniture. The bedrooms were still downstairs, apparently almost every unit in this development is a split level with downstairs bedrooms, but there seemed to be a sufficient amount of natural light filtering through the windows to make it livable.
We told her we would take it!