the square is a circle.

I moved to the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago seven years ago, somewhat relunctantly actually. I was coerced by my sister and an apartment on the circle with a garbage disposal that was half a block from the train station. You see, Logan Square is actually a circle. A wonderfully confusing mess of staight/curved/diagonal streets that allow you to weed out intruders to your neighborhood simply by observing who does or does not know how to properly navigate said circle.

I wasn't so sure about the West Side or the Blue Line at the time. It was "FAR!" from my friends (South Loop/Lincoln Park) and my school (South Loop) and I would have to take TWO TRAINS to get anywhere! (UGGGHHH! So hard!) Stefanie said, "Just wait. In five years, this area is going to start growing like crazy." To which I said, "FIVE YEARS?! But we live here NOW!" (P.S. I love reminiscing about how whiney I was to my sister all the time.) Well, obviously, she did not lead me astray. Seven years and three apartments later, I've gotten to experience the changes to the neighborhood first hand.

The Logan Theatre was renovated back to its original glory and then some in 2012.
(Instagram stolen from A.)
The downside of living in the new "hot" neighborhood is that rent just keeps going up. And the property managers don't seem to care about making any improvements to their apartments because there are one hundred new tenants just waiting for you to get sick of your shitty place so they can move in. Immediately after the honeymoon, Todd and I had the super-fun task of looking for a new apartment, effective immediately. Not the most relaxing way to start your life together as 'newlyweds', but it was necessary.

At this point, I'd like to note that getting married can really skew your priorities and outlook on life. Like, "We're married now! We need to have two bathrooms, a garage, a fancy kitchen, a yard, and LOTS of closets!" We were ready to shell out hundreds more dollars a month to try to meet this expectation. We were open to any neighborhood; anywhere that we could check off as many of those boxes as possible. The more places Todd emailed to me to take a look at, the more discouraging the search became. How far do we go - geographically AND monitarily - to try to get the "dream" apartment? How many more places can we see before we just settle for something we don't love? Even in the perfect apartment, would we really love it as much as we love living in Logan Square? Have we gone about this search all wrong?

Our last day at our first place. That was our window right above our heads.
If the smiles above didn't already give it away... Surprise! We officially moved into my fourth apartment in Logan Square (Todd's second) on June 22nd; exactly six weeks after our wedding day. We found a great place in our favorite neighborhood for way less than the places we were looking at elsewhere. How did we do that, you ask? I'll have to get editor's notes from Todd because, honestly, he did it all. Including forcing me to make up my mind about what was most important. Our new place doesn't check all the crazy boxes we had dreamed up, but it checks enough of them. And we realized that the most important box was actually a Square. (Which is actually a circle.)

We appropriately chose to shoot some of our engagement photos last year
by the 'Home' mural outside of the Logan Square Blue Line station.

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