How we finally found the apartment

We started looking in February, which everyone told us was a mistake. The good places go in spring, they said. Wait. So of course we didn’t wait — we made a shared spreadsheet, color-coded by neighborhood, and started saying yes to every viewing that wasn’t an obvious disaster.

The first one had a bathroom you could only reach through the bedroom. The second smelled, faintly but unmistakably, of soup. By the tenth we had a rating system and strong opinions about radiators. By the twentieth we had stopped being polite about it.

The one that got away

There was a place on a quiet street with morning light in the kitchen and a window seat that Elizabeth immediately, silently, claimed. We applied that afternoon. We were the second couple to apply that afternoon. You can guess the rest.

We almost gave up the week before we found it. That seems to be how these things go.

The Tuesday it rained, we almost cancelled. The listing was vague, the photos were dark, and we were tired of being disappointed in person. We went anyway, mostly because we’d already paid for the train.

It was small, and the kitchen tap dripped, and there was a green in the hallway we’d spend a whole weekend painting over. But the light came in low and gold across the floor, and we looked at each other, and that was that. We applied from the platform on the way home.

Six weeks later we had the keys. The first night we ate takeaway off moving boxes and didn’t unpack a thing. It’s the best apartment we’ve ever seen. We’re certain. We looked at forty others to be sure.