Right after we moved to Ashburn (a year ago) I was subbing at a local elementary school and working with a student teacher for the day. During lunch we were talking and she told me about a program the county has for middle income people that make too much for low income housing, but not enough to really thrive in the most expensive county in the country. Yea, we picked the wrong place to move to :)
I wrote the information down and told Darren about it later that day. We didn't do anything about it for months. I think we started looking into it in January, when we started getting fed up with our downstairs neighbors (seriously the loudest people we've ever heard, and they're downstairs!). The Affordable Dwelling Unit program has two parts - the purchase program, and the rental program. Darren talked to a guy he works with that is in the purchase program and found out we could be paying less for a mortgage than we did for rent, so we decided to go that route.
It took a few months to do all the back and forth with the county, but it ended up not working out for us to buy (not due to the county, but due to the banks). About that time we were thinking about trying the rental program anyway (it will save us the same amount of money every month), so we could save up more and be better off when we do buy a home. In May we got everything ready for the rental program and we had our names on the schedule for an intake appointment with the county on October 19. First off, I was shocked it was going to take 5 months for us to be seen, but I guess there's a lot of people trying to get into the program. Secondly, I looked at the date and realized it was only 5 days before my due date! I got a little worried that the baby would come around then and Darren wouldn't be able to make it to the meeting and we'd have to start all over again. Thirdly, our lease was up November 27th and we had to give 60 days notice before we could leave, so what in the world were we going to do.
So, Darren ended up calling the office back and letting them know about our baby situation and asking them what we should do. They kept us on the list for the October appointment, since that was the earliest available, but noted in our file that we would like to fill in for someone that dropped out of an earlier slot if possible. A week or two later Darren got a phone call from the ADU office and someone had indeed dropped out of the September intake appointment and we were in if we wanted the slot. Hooray!
The months of waiting were no fun, but lets face it, we've been waiting since February for this baby so we're used to it :) We had our intake appointment Thursday, September 6, turned in all of our paperwork, and were notified Tuesday, September 11, that everything was approved and our "Rental Certificate" would be coming in the mail within a few days.
We immediately started calling the complexes in the county that accept the certificate and put our name on their waitlists. We knew it would probably be a while before we heard anything back and we still had a few weeks before we had to let our complex know what we would be doing, so we just sat pretty and hoped something would come up.
A few of the complexes need to actually see our certificate before they would put our names on the list, so when we got that in the mail on the 14th Darren went around the next day and visited them. One complex said they possibly had an ADU apartment coming available in the next few weeks but they didn't have to know until the 27th, so they'd put our names down on the list. They suggested we call them on the 20th, but couldn't make any promises.
Now, the way this "list" works is that anyone who is interested in a specific apartment has their name and phone number written down. When an ADU apartment comes available they call everyone on the list and the first person to show up with their $200 deposit gets the apartment. Crazy!
Well, on September 18, I got a somewhat frantic call from Darren at about 10:30am. He had gotten a voicemail from the complex that said they might have something soon, and it turns out that apartment would be available on the 27th, and the first person down to their office would get it. He, of course, was at work, so I quickly called the complex back to see if it was still available. It was, so I threw on some clothes (I was still in my pajamas and unshowered) and ran out the door with our checkbook. The complex was only like 10-15 minutes away, but seemed to take forever to get there. I hurried in (well, as fast as I could go at 7 months pregnant) and ended up being the first one there! There was a smidge of drama for a second when it turned out they didn't make a copy of our certificate when Darren was in before and needed to have one, but the girl who had met with him a few days before had seen it and vouched for us, and the apartment was ours!!!
Things moved pretty quickly after that. Darren had to swing by after work that day to fill out some paperwork and we needed to figure out what we were going to do about our finances for the next two months with two apartments. As it turned out, our old complex and our new complex are owned by the same company, so we could actually "transfer" and only have to give 30 days notice and be in two apartments for only a matter of a few weeks. Now, these are the only sister complexes that work with this program, so it was definitely a blessing!
The next thing we had to tackle was the whole moving wards issue. I was dreading this. We had hoped to be able to stay in the ward, and our new complex was the only one in the program NOT in our ward boundaries. With the timing of the move coming so soon before we would be having a baby I was worried that we wouldn't get some of the help we might need from a new ward that we'd only been to a few times. We also didn't really want to bless him in a completely unfamiliar ward. We decided to meet with our bishop and talk it over with him. Well, Darren ended up being the only one to meet with him because I just couldn't handle it emotionally and sat in the parking lot the whole time :) We have a great bishop, and he ended up suggesting that we stay in our current ward until the new year, and then transition to our new one. He had to clear it with the other bishop as well, but they both felt this was a good idea for us and we feel great about it too!
After all that was cleared up, we got our keys on September 29th! We didn't have to be out of our old place until October 20th, so we decided to wait a week before moving everything and did that this past Saturday. Before we moved everything in I was able to get some pictures of our new place. It looks much homier now with all of our stuff in, but I'll get pictures up of that later when it's all put together the way we want it.
View from our entry way: Kitchen & Dining Room (the Master Bedroom door is just to the right of the kitchen, between it and the living room)
View from the Kitchen: Entry, Desk area, Dining Room
From Dining Room: Living Room, hallway to Nursery & Guest Bath
Guest Bathroom
Nursery
Huge closet in the Nursery (we're using it for storage)
Master Bathroom
Master Bathtub!!
Master Bedroom
Master Closet
We are so happy with our new apartment, and definitely know things worked out the way they did because we were supposed to be here. It won't hurt to be saving $400-500 a month with a baby coming either! We are still getting settled in, but it's definitely going faster than it normally would since I'm in nesting mode and wanting everything to be done :)
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