One year ago today, we touched down in Arizona with the intention of living here. We are still very pleased with the city of Chandler. Having had more time to look at the cities around us, I think it was the right one in particular rather than just the right part of the country. It has ended up ticking nearly all the boxes we had hoped it would.
Below is a list I found on my old UK Samsung Galaxy S3 phone of things we wanted in the US city we would move to. This is what we were thinking we wanted before we traveled in 2015:
Bath and shower Gas stove Yard Near shops By water Public transport House Good internet speed New as possible Flat Bike friendly Park with ping pong Chick-fil-a Air conditioning No legal weed Low violent crime Indian food Airport Grocery delivery Red dodge pick up truck Taxi LESS BUILDERS
We got the vast majority of these:
Bath and shower Gas stove
Our apartment has one bath, two showers and a gas stove. That said, we almost never use the bath since we have a hot tub that’s a stone’s throw from the apartment. Also, American bathtubs are nearly always small and appear more suitable to bathing a child than an adult. Even before the hot tub came back into use after the construction, we weren’t using it much. Now that the hot tub available again, we nearly exclusively use that instead. The gas stove, on the other hands, is used all the time and we are pleased we were able to find a place with a gas rather than electric stove.
Yard
We don’t have a yard, but we have ample outside space in the form of the grounds of the apartment community and we also have our own balcony. Our only outside space in the UK was a shared shed, so this is a huge improvement.
Near shops By water
We are quite near the shops by American standards, though not as near as we were in the UK. There was a small supermarket that was a 5 minute walk from our flat in Brighton, while the shops are a 5 minute car ride now. When we said by water, we were thinking of the ocean, but being near a pool has hit a similar spot. If anything, though I love the ocean, I do feel much more comfortable swimming in a pool and I love the hot tub.
Public transport House
Working from home and owning a car, public transport has been far less important. It’s not especially great here, but we’ve felt no desire to use it. We also don’t actually want a house right now either. Maybe we will change our minds, but as we said earlier in the year, we really like the whole apartment community thing. It works very well having staff that you get to know who fix problems rather than having to ring up an insurance company and talk to a stranger every time something major breaks. Basically, we are still very much experiencing the joy of not owning things. I don’t think that will change any time soon.
Good internet speed
Our internet speed is excellent. This part of the country is blessed not to have to cope with the most hated Comcast. Instead, we have Cox. Cox is a great provider. We have only had one outage all year and that appeared to be an attack in many US cities. They even managed to get it up and running in time for us to stream Game of Thrones that same day.
New as possible
Our apartment has very much lived up to the whole new as possible thing. This community was built 12 years ago and was fully renovated this year. We are really enjoying not living in an antique. It’s more comfortable, requires less repair, and is much easier to keep clean.
In addition to being newer, it is much more spacious. A combination of these two things means that it’s much easier to organize. Chris lived in our previous home for 10 years; I lived there for 5. By the time we left, we had exhausted all possible configurations of furniture. We have had to put far less effort into arranging our apartment here and that has been a big relief. Coping with a small space is an ongoing stress we are happy to have said goodbye to.
In particular, we are very happy to have a bigger, more modern kitchen. The one in Brighton had originally been part of a hallway that was chopped into a bathroom, said kitchen and a much smaller hallway. It was small enough that we couldn’t both use it at the same time. We love our huge American kitchen. We are really enjoying having room for massive American appliances like a big fridge and separate washers and dryers. In the UK, we had a combo, which is common there due to space restrictions. I also still love my dishwasher. That is another uncommon thing in Britain. You can actually buy a half dishwasher there apparently, once again, due to limited space in the average flat. I have really enjoyed that we have only gone through a single 24 oz container of dish-washing liquid in all of 2016. I never want to go without a dishwasher again.
Tech has also been much more possible in a new apartment than it was in an 1840s flat. For instance, this place has plenty of power sockets. I always felt the flat in Brighton was a bit of a fire hazard with the million cables we had running around the house. Moreover, it was actually built before electricity was common in homes. Our light bulbs tended to blow up rather than just go out. That isn’t a problem here. On the contrary, if we ever want a smart home, this place could easily be made to fit the bill. I’m not sure the place in the UK could manage it.
Flat Bike friendly Park with ping pong Chick-fil-a
Chandler is very flat i.e. not hilly and fairly bike friendly on other counts as well. We don’t have a park with a ping pong table, but rather an apartment community with one, which is even better as it’s a lot closer. We also are quite near a Chick-fil-a. We don’t go that often, but this is something Chris tried when he was a very little boy in Florida in his first ever visit to a food court, so it has a special place in his heart, well, compared to most fast food chains anyway. 🙂
Air conditioning Low violent crime No legal weed
Obviously, we have air conditioning. That is uncommon in the UK, but necessary in most of the US. In regard to crime, earlier this year, Chandler made its way on a list of the top 10 lowest crime cities with a population over 200,000. We were at with #10 with our neighboring city of Gilbert at #2. As for the weed thing, neither of us smoke anything. As we wouldn’t have been buying any of it, legal weed would have mainly brought us its downside: high driving. They still don’t have a solid way of dealing with that, so on balance, we are happy that Arizona doesn’t have legal weed. I believe at the time that we wrote the list, we were living next door to some people who smoked weed in their flat all the time as well. Even though weed isn’t technically legal in Britain, it’s virtually never enforced, so it was a pretty common scent in Brighton. I have enjoyed not smelling it in a very long time. If anything, as a non-smoker with a sensitive nose, I was thrilled when they banned smoking in general in the pool area of our apartment complex. I very much enjoy a smoke free environment.
Indian food
I actually have no idea what our local Indian food is like, but that hasn’t proved to be a problem as Chris has been inspired to learn to make it. Having access to grills has changed how we eat in a big way. The increased heat given by the grills means that we are more able to make restaurant quality food at home with ingredients we control. In the last year, I think we’ve probably had about 8 takeaways, 2 Chinese and the rest pizza. We definitely got more takeaways than that a year in Britain.
The vast majority of the time that we want pizza, Chris just makes it on the grill. Every Indian meal we’ve had in the US has had the chicken made on the grill as well. We have also taken up eating a fair amount of Mexican food since, naturally, the sort of produce needed to make nice fajitas grows well near here. I never really ate jalapeños before. I turns out that I just didn’t like them pickled. Safeway sells amazing fresh ones for 17 cents a pepper. They really make our fajitas pop.
Grocery delivery
We were also able to continue getting grocery delivery. It is far less common here, but Safeway do it well enough. It’s actually one of the few things that’s more expensive here, but that does make sense as things are a lot more spread out here. Grocery delivery is common in the UK because people live in a more densely packed fashion. The Sainsburys driver could easily have multiple stops on the same road. That would be astonishingly unlikely here, even with some of the roads being very long.
Airport Taxi
We are near a major airport that does direct flights to Heathrow, which is very convenient for visiting the UK. Surprisingly few US airports have direct UK flights and most of them are out East. In terms of other transport, I know nothing about local taxis, but Uber is very common here. As we own a car and mainly eat at home, we use far fewer taxis than we did in the UK, but Uber has been very easy to use and access whenever we have needed them.
Red dodge pick up truck
We didn’t get a red dodge pick up truck. I think that might have been half a joke, but we do obviously own a silver Dodge car now.
LESS BUILDERS
At first, we got just as many builders, but with the renovation at our apartment complex complete, we are finally in the land of no construction work. Due to legally forcing normal people to preserve the state of older properties in the many parts of the UK, construction was extremely widespread where we lived. On any given day, there were at least 3 to 5 sets of scaffolding up on our street in Brighton. I have really enjoyed not being frequently woken to a serenade of saws. Even having had construction for the first part of the year, it was at least to our benefit rather than being something done by our neighbors to conform with the law. We do at least get to enjoy the thing we had to hear being built. That was nice for a change.
That concludes our analysis of what we did and didn’t get in terms of the things we wanted before moving. Part 2 will deal with the things we got and love even though we didn’t know we wanted them.
Here’s the video: