I am delighted to share with you that an important milestone in our preparation to move to Israel has been accomplished – we’ve found a place to live in Israel!

I’ve been looking for a place in Karmiel since March and at the beginning of June (yes, this is one more thing I was busy with at the same time I was planning the Torah Home Education Conference! :)), we signed a contract on an apartment for our family.  It involved eight weeks of smoothing out lots of bumps, and I am so grateful to have this piece in place.  The apartment will be available on August 15, and having a concrete date to work with makes everything else easier.  (Eg, you can’t buy tickets until you know you have a place to go, and I can’t tell potential buyers when our home is available until I know when we’ll be leaving!)

Though apartment living is normal in Israel and I’m comfortable with the idea, I was concerned about having to live in a much smaller space than what we were used to.  I’m trying to make the transition as smooth as possible for the kids – there will be enough transitions without me drastically changing their standard of living.  The challenge was finding something that was big enough that was also in our price range – housing in Israel is expensive, even in the less expensive areas like the north.  There are a number of beautiful large homes available in Karmiel, but they are pricey (and though it’s true that housing is much more expensive in the central areas of Israel, it doesn’t make other areas cheap), and apartments tend to be on the smaller side.  I wanted at least four bedrooms (5 rooms, as it’s called in Israel) which I don’t think is being a prima donna considering we’re 11 people.  But once you’re looking for more than a three bedroom apartment, you drastically narrow down what’s available. 

But Hashem (G-d) sent us just what we needed!  It’s a large apartment, according to Israeli standards – 160 meters (approximately 1700 sf).   If I were to figure the actual living space in our home now, not including the finished basement (which is basically just used for storage) and half of the attic that we use for storage, it comes out to basically the same square footage.   We’ve given away lots of our belongings and since we won’t be taking much stuff with us, the apartment should be a reasonable size for us all. 

It’s called a duplex apartment, meaning that it’s on two floors.  There are six rooms (five bedrooms – actually, more like 4.5 bedrooms because of the layout – you have to walk through one room to get to another).  The main floor has a kitchen, combined living room/dining room (this combined area is known as a ‘salon’ in Israel), small porch off the kitchen for the washing machine, three bedrooms, and a small porch off the salon.  There’s a spiral staircase that leads upstairs, where there are two rooms.  The staircase enters directly into the first room, and then directly from that room you enter into the second bedroom.   As of now, I’m thinking the best use of space will be to give the littles the open room because they won’t care if their older brothers walk through their space.  🙂

The kids are all used to sharing bedrooms, and they’ll actually be more spaced out than they are currently if we have three of them in each bedroom as tenatively planned.  Ds18 will be away at yeshiva and only home for one Shabbos a month, so there will just be ds9 and ds12 in the older boys’ room when he’s away.  Dd16  asked if she could sleep in the extra bedroom when we don’t have guests; if we agree to that (this isn’t a given by any means), there will only be two girls in the other room.  Though most families our size don’t have the luxury of a guest room (due to the compact size of apartments in Israel), by using our space as described we’ll be able to have one room for when guests visit!  I feel very abundant.

We’ve been very spoiled in our current home in that we have 3.5 bathrooms, and though I know it’s a luxury to have so many bathrooms, I’ve really loved having the privacy of dh and I not sharing a bathroom with the kids. (When we renovated the attic, we turned it into our bedroom and put in a full bathroom.)   The apartment was listed as having two full bathrooms, one upstairs and one downstairs, which I was glad about since only one would be very tough for us and a number of the apartments listed had two toilets but only one shower.  Imagine my surprise when dd16 (who went to see it two days before she came home for Pesach) offhandedly mentioned that there was a bathroom in the master bedroom!   I thought that meant that there wasn’t a bathroom upstairs (since there were only supposed to be two total), but she told me that there are actually three bathrooms – for some reason there was an error on the listing.  So we’ll still be able to have one bathroom just for us, the boys will share the one share upstairs, and last one will be on the main floor for the girls and guests.  This many bathrooms is so unusual for apartments there – amazing, isn’t it?

I ideally would have loved a ground floor apartment with a garden, or alternatively a huge porch.  But that’s not what I found, and now I won’t have to worry about the upkeep or water usage to maintain a yard.  This apartment is on the first floor (14 steps up) and has a small porch – maybe 4′ x 8′ – it’s fine for daily use, and for Sukkos we’ll have to figure out what to do.   The apartment building has only four apartments total, which is nice because it is more personal than a huge building.  It’s on a quiet street that is very central, with easy walking access to everything.   A huge and beautiful park is just five minutes away, food shopping is a two minute walk, and the shul is a five minute walk.  (We’re not planning on having a car so how close things are by foot is important!)

Since it’s been rented for over 15 years, it hasn’t had much in the way of asthetics invested in it. The top cabinets in the kitchen don’t match the bottom cabinets, and the entire apartment could use a coat of fresh paint.  But those are cosmetic issues that can be dealt with without much difficulty if we want to.  We asked a contractor to check it out since there was a mildew spot on one wall upstairs, and we needed to make sure there wasn’t a mold issue.  It turns out there are a couple of broken tiles on the roof that led to a small leak, and by replacing those tiles the issue will be able to be resolved.

Though it’s simple, it meets my most important criteria of space and location: location was very important to me, since it’s hard to feel involved in your community if you’re a big hike away from where the nucleus of your friends are living.  I would have loved it if we were able to find a place that already had some furnishings there, just so there would be something in place for us when we get there.  But Israeli apartments don’t come with appliances, let alone furniture, so we’ll need to purchase a stove, refrigerator, and washing machine as well as all of our other furniture pretty much as soon as we get there.  My plan is to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and eventually it will all get done. 🙂 

Avivah