City Girl: Coming February 2014

Yup, that's right. I will be moving to the big city in a few short months. No, not New York....DALLAS!

You know, I've never considered myself a city girl. In fact, I'm pretty sure less than a year ago the words 'I could never live in a city.' came out of my mouth. Well that all changed when I accepted a full time position about 20 minutes south of downtown Dallas. Amazing how perspectives can change in such a short time.

I will be graduating college in less than a month (WHAT???) from UNT with my bachelor's degree in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. During my time interviewing for a post college salary position I figured I would just drive to wherever I ended up working for the first 7-8 months, as my apartment lease goes through July. That is until I got the job with DalTile in south Dallas. Turns out that I have the option of driving almost 100 miles a day through I-35 traffic, or 4 hours a day on a train ride between Denton and Dallas. Not exactly ideal solutions...so the apartment hunt began. I'll be honest, I've lived less than an hour from Dallas my entire life and I've never really explored it. Sure I've gone to concerts, museums, and the Dallas Aquarium but never really looked around the neighborhoods. I was clueless. Ahh internet you are such a sweet resource. I asked the wise search engines of the world wide web where a young, single girl should live in such a city. West Village! Uptown! Deep Ellum! What are these foreign lands? Well there's only so much the internet can tell me, it was time to go exploring.

With my sweet boyfriend as my companion for the day I set out to roam the land. I figured I would just get a feel for the different neighborhoods, certainly not sign up for an apartment yet. Oh the places we went: West Village, Downtown, Uptown, and others. Man can I tell you, some areas of Dallas are SKETCH. Yeah the apartment buildings looked nice online, but the areas around those apartments? NOPE. I was beginning to feel a little discouraged. The nice areas of Dallas are SUPER expensive, and cheaper apartments are in areas I wouldn't be comfortable in alone. Feeling slightly defeated we started heading back home to Denton. On our way we passed one more complex on the edge of Deep Ellum, I was all sorts of done for the day so we didn't go in to check it out. Although we did look up information on the way home. It sounded PERFECT! I was regretting not stopping by. Reasonably priced; gated entrances; parking garage connected to the building; spacious 1 bedroom (200 sq ft more than my current apartment); a club house with a workout room, movie theatre, business center, AND hang out lounge? I was in love. Trouble was there was only 1 unit becoming available in the next few months that was in my price range. After crunching numbers and a little more research I decided to go tour the apartment the very next day. Everything added up in person as it did online and more! I was pretty darn impressed. So, naturally, I applied.

I am now the proud future tenant of a big girl apartment in Dallas! It's a 10 minute walk to downtown, 5 minute walk to Deep Ellum, AND a 15 minute drive to work. Needless to say, I'm a pretty happy girl. Here's to moving on to bigger and better things post graduation!


Allons-y!