Despite my best efforts, starting our apartment search a month in advance clearly didn’t work in our favor (we started 8 days before our lease was expiring last year, so a month seemed generous!). Meg’s main priority was finding a two-floor apartment in our price range; we did that, and put down a pre-security deposit of a couple of hundred bucks to prove our intent, and waited for the day that we would meet the landlord to pay the rest and get the keys … but that was never to happen.

Instead, the night before we were to do the swap, the landlord called me.

“So, I need to talk to you guys.”

“Oh? What about?”

“I didn’t think I had to tell you before … but I put the house on the market a couple of months ago, and now I have an interested buyer.”

[ pause ] “Huh.”

“But I do have a condo in the same community that’s available!”

“Does it have two floors?”

“No.”

Needless to say, I was pretty peeved. What happened to common courtesy? One would think that when we first went to look at the townhouse, she might have mentioned that it was on the market. Instead, she said that we would sign the lease for a year, and if we liked, we could buy it after that.

Ridiculous.

So it ended up being a crazy weekend of visiting loads of apartments in the area, because, well, our lease is up August 31 and I really would rather not be homeless. Unfortunately, none of the two-floor places we looked at had central air, or they had strangely-shaped and very small bedrooms, or they were totally beaten up. You’d think that landlords would take care of their property, but apparently that’s not the case.

At this point, I am just awaiting confirmation from the landlord of a place right on the border of Edison and Metuchen. It is one floor, but it has two good-sized bedrooms, a spacious kitchen, gorgeous hardwood floors, central air, a large yard, and is located close to the Parkway and Turnpike - must-haves in my book.

I wish I had someone else to go through this process for me. I’m exhausted. And so is Meg.

The sad thing about all of this is that, for what we pay in Jersey for a two-bedroom, one-floor apartment, you can get a three-bedroom townhouse in Northern Virginia, or a 2500-square-foot house with a two-car garage in North Carolina.

Can you tell I miss the South?