Alright, I'm really bad about rambling.  So I'm going to try to stay on-topic but hopefully you can forgive me if I get sidetracked!  My attempt at the short version:

We hate this apartment.  There are worse places to live but this one definitely sucks!  So many things wrong with it I don't even want to start in on listing them.  When DH originally signed the lease, it was supposed to be just a place for him to stay for a year while I finished school and he saved up money for something nicer.  But I had to move up early, and with all my medical and immigration expenses to cover on only one salary, it became a lot harder to save up money for a new apartment.  We really wanted to move last year but decided getting a car was going to be a wiser decision in the long run.  This year DH has a raise and a hefty bonus and we have my money from the photo studio set aside so we are OUTTA HERE!

Which means we are apartment hunting.  Oh joy.  See, the town where we live is well known for not having enough housing.  Not that we have homeless people in the streets, but housing is as expensive here as it is in Quebec City which is 10x the size of our town!  And anything higher quality than a student/bachelor type apartment is extremely hard to find.

Now we have an idea of our ideal apartment.  We know what area of town we'd like to be in - close enough for DH to walk to work and me to walk to all the GOOD shopping.  We know that we want to live on the top floor, and not have people walking past our windows.  We want good soundproofing because we're tired of listening to our neighbor's TV.  We'd like a washer/dryer hookup because we actually own a washing machine but we haven't been able to use it here.  A parking space that we won't have to fight to get in and out of.  A balcony and a clothesline would be nice.  We want a little more space, maybe one or two more rooms than what we have now.  And of course we have to be able to afford it!

I wasn't really expecting to find anything that met all these criteria, and I figured just having some of these would be better than what we have now!  But here's why I'm so excited today...

All of these criteria are actually based on a friend's apartment.  I don't know if any of you remember our friend C, who was DH's first wife?  When DH and I first moved here, C and her new husband E had this really nice, just-the-right-size apartment in the right part of town with pretty much everything we wanted for ourselves.  Every time we've talked about moving we've said we wanted an apartment "like C's old place."  They bought a house a couple years ago and we wanted to take over their apartment but we couldn't afford it at the time.  A different friend of theirs took it instead.  Then last year this other friend hinted at moving out for a while, but we decided to buy a car and they ended up staying put anyway.  This year when we could finally afford to move, we heard that they had a baby now and weren't planning to leave.  Oh, well! 

So we've been watching the newspapers, talking to friends, etc.  God, the apartments you see for rent in the newspapers in this town are freaking depressing!  Either tiny, or way out of our price range, or the ad just sounds a little creepy.  We do have one lead through one of DH's colleauges on an apartment that would probably suit us, but it's in the high end of what we can afford and it's further away from work instead of closer.

And then DH IMs me this morning...C's old apartment is coming available this year!  It turns out they're buying a house after all, they already put an offer in.  It'll be finalized for them within the week.  If their offer is accepted (and it seems like it will be) the apartment would be available in March.  Now how insane is this??  That we would have a chance at not just a better apartment but THE apartment that we've been basing all our ideas of "better" on?!  I'm using double punctuation and everything!!

And on top of it being basically exactly what we want, it would only cost about $20 more per month in rent than what we would be paying for this dump next year if we renewed our lease (our landlord has augmented our rent every single year so far!)

Of course nothing is certain yet.  First their offer has to go through.  Then we have to actually get the new apartment, and come to an agreement with our landlord about the last few months of our lease.  A lot could still go wrong or badly.  But my god, could opportunity knock any louder?  I mean, I assumed we'd missed our chance long ago and we'd have to settle for what we could get.  And now it just so happens that right when we're finally able to move, the apartment we've been drooling over finally comes on the market? 

In an odd way this whole situation reminds me a lot of how DH and I met in the first place.  It seems like all the pieces fell in the right place long before we even knew what the "right place" was.  If anything in this whole saga had turned out any other way, this wouldn't even be happening right now, and yet, here we are.  I don't know that I believe in fate, and I still believe you make a lot of your own luck.  And I certainly don't believe that "all things come together for the good!" But I guess sometimes they do!

So wish us luck :D