Our Apartment

For those of you that don't know, we officially arrived in Italy around 5:30pm on May 6th, 2009. The first thing we did was go to our new apartment to drop off our luggage and take a look around. This is the best place we've lived in so far. We are on the third floor of a building of about 12 apartments. When you walk through the front door there's a closet straight ahead, a very roomy living room is off to the left, and a small bathroom is on the right. This bathroom has a stand up shower, a toilet, a sink, and a washer and dryer with some shelves for storage around the top. The living room has french doors that open up to one end of our big balcony outside, as well as another door on the other wall leading out to the other side. The balcony stretches the whole length of the apartment. When you walk into the apartment there is a hallway leading down the apartment with the rest of the rooms. The kitchen is connected to the living room with a good sized bar window and shelf, and also has a door leading out to the balcony. There are cupboards everywhere and a sort of mini-closet with some enclosed shelves that provide enough room to keep all of our food there. In the hallway across from the kitchen is another closet with more shelves, and next to that is a walk-in pantry with even more shelving. Next to the pantry is the bigger bedroom, which comes with a huge closet against one wall as well as a walk in storage area. Across the hall is the 2nd bedroom. This bedroom has a closet against one wall and another door leading out to the balcony. In between the two bedrooms, at the end of the hall, is the 2nd bathroom. This bathroom has a full tub, sink, toilet, and a baday. This is my favorite bathroom because there is a big window in the shower and the shelf is big enough to put all of our shower things on it. All of the flooring in the apartment is tile, the walls are white, and it is very bright and open. All of the doors leading to the balcony are glass and there are windows in all of the rooms, so we rarely need to use the lights. The only problem we ran into with the apartment is that the stove is in Celcius, but we figured it out easily and don't need to think twice about it anymore. The direction our apartment faces is good for a few reasons. For one, we are on the inside of the group of buildings (away from the road) so for the most part it's very peaceful outside. This also makes it nice because we are friends with a couple in the building next door and if we're out on the balcony we're close enough to say hello to each other and maybe yell something here or there, but far enough away that we have our own privacy. The balcony is perfect because first thing in the morning it's in the shade. As the day goes on, the sun slowly starts to move over the balcony and warms everything up, but it never really gets far enough to cover the entire balcony and come into the house, which is nice because it gets very sunny and hot at times, but we're able to choose whether we want to sit in the sun or keep cool in the shade. The entire balcony is covered on top by the roof, but it also comes equipped with two seperate covers that roll out even further to block the sun and also give us more privacy if we wanted (which we haven't needed to use yet). There are little playgrounds everywhere on the base, including right below our balcony, but there is a nicer playground just a short walk down the road. Friday, May 15th, we are picking up our furniture and camera, so stay tuned for pictures.