I'm going to begin this with the story of our first house hunting experience. "Our" in this case, is a very loose term, as I wasn't actually present. You see, my man gets a ton of vacation days a year, so we thought it would be wise if he used a few of them to fly down to the new city to check out some potential places to live. He was armed with a camera, a list of places I've found with the help of my sister, a friend, and various websites, and a few very specific things I'm looking for. Here's that list:

• closet space
  
• dog friendly
  
• nice bathrooms, nice, open kitchen
  
• in or around the artsy part of town
  
• big, lofty space would be preferable to boring boxy apartment
  
• windows, natural light and more windows: VERY important
  

Fairly simple, right? I spoke to him several times a day while he was there, hearing about how the places were. He liked some more than others, based on location or aesthetics. He found a bunch of apartments through realtors and signs as well, and he went to look at those. There were a few converted industrial loft buildings I was really excited about, he saw a couple of them, told me he liked them, and we started a short list of places we would check out when we go there together next month. All seemed to be going well.

Then he came to visit last weekend, with some literature in hand from the house hunt. I also got to see some photos he had taken. Some of the information was very exciting, though I had hoped to see more pictures. Then he pulled out a brochure that didn't seem like it fit into the rest. It was a big apartment complex, standard boxy apartment layout. Hmmm well, maybe it was in a great neighborhood, in the heart of where we'd agreed we would really like to live? Nope, not even close. Lovely neighborhood, sure, but stuck in the middle of a bunch of large, lovely homes, nowhere near where we were looking. But he liked it. He liked the wide, winding road of the neighborhood and look! Storage! For golf clubs and man cave stuff!

Let's review how it meets the list requirements:

• closet space
  
• dog friendly (marginally)
  
• nice bathrooms, nice, open kitchen
  in or around the artsy part of town
  big, lofty space would be preferable to boring boxy apartment
  windows, natural light and more windows: VERY important
  

FAIL

Needless to say, I wasn't impressed. I chucked the big, colorful pamphlet aside and he grumbled. This place, to me, was the Super Target of apartments. Sure, it may have stuff that is useful, and it may be clean and new and nice enough. But it's vanilla and boxy and there are 100 duplicates of it. I thought it was understood that we were looking for the urban boutique store of apartments. Funky and unique and quirky. There was a definite breakdown in communication. He was surprised by my "inflexibility", because I wouldn't even give it a chance, had no desire to even go see it. Did he just meet me?

To top it off, one of the places I really wanted to check out was a building I'd been to before. I didn't remember where it was (my sense of direction is awesome like that), but found out while he was there. He didn't have time to go see it, and wasn't terribly interested anyway, because a couple of people told him the neighborhood sucked. That was that. He didn't care about any other details.

I declare hypocrisy!

We will see how things go next month when we visit, but this could be more difficult than even I anticipated.