Tag Your Dog

Even though you call it home, your apartment will be a new, wondrous place for your dog. It’s easy to get disoriented, and even the best pet owners can lose track of their best friend. It’s not uncommon for lost pets to be returned quickly, but that can only happen if your dog wears tags. You can go the extra mile and get your dog chipped, too. If they happen to make it off of the apartment community grounds, you’ll still be able to find and retrieve them.

How Long Are You Away?

It’s important for any dog owner to know how much they’ll be away from home, but it’s doubly important at an apartment. Our apartment community is a great place for pets to socialize with each other with easy access to a dog park. But when a dog is too isolated, it can lead to bad social skills and aggressive behavior.

You can overcome this by hiring a dog walker, using doggy daycare or having a second pet. You just need to have a good plan before you dive into dog ownership.

Training is Good

Your dog wants to make you happy. One of the best ways to help them do that is to set clear rules and boundaries. If you’re calm, patient, and consistent, they’ll quickly learn right from wrong and life will be good. Just remember that training has to start from day one. When you change the rules for your dog, they get confused. Likewise, training never really stops. If it was wrong once, it has to be wrong every time. Most importantly, positive reinforcement works best. Reward them for good behavior and they’ll be excited to follow the rules.

The best way to get a feel for our apartments in Flagstaff is to visit. Call today and schedule a tour of our apartment community!

The post 3 Things to Consider Before Adopting a Dog appeared first on Country Club Vista Apartments Blog.

Tips for Hosting a Game Night

Fun-Friendly Foods

Finger foods are the perfect choice for a game night event. They allow people to graze as the night progresses and as their hunger requires. You can set up a buffet-style area in your kitchen to allow guests to serve themselves. You might even consider ordering a couple of pizzas (depending on the number of guests you’re hosting) to feed your horde of hungry gamers and supplement your selection of finger foods.

Clean and Clear Surface for Game Boards and Pieces

One of the biggest complaints about game night fun is having to wait to set things up until a space has been cleared for gaming. Make sure your playing surface is ready to go when your guests arrive. If you know which game you’re planning to play, go ahead and have the board set up and pieces in place to save time and get the fun started.

Sufficient Seating for All Your Guests

Try to get a head count ahead of time for the total number of people attending and any “plus ones” they may be bringing along. This not only helps you determine how much food to prepare but also how much seating you’ll need to accommodate all your guests.

Make Rules Known

If your gathering is coming together for a specific game, consider printing little reminders about the rules or “procedures” of the game to help the players understand the rules and explain the game play mechanics.

Contact us today to learn about apartments in Flagstaff, and make sure you find an apartment that nicely accommodates your game night plans.

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How to Organize a Kitchen Pantry

1. Invest in a Label Maker

Keep a label maker in your kitchen for a more organized pantry. Whenever you store things in empty jars and bottles, make a label that will enable you to quickly identify the ingredients. Yes, you could handwrite labels, but the label maker ensures the writing is always easy to read.

2. Organize According to Size

Taller items should always be stored at the back of your kitchen pantry. Shorter items can go in front. This allows you to have several rows of items while still be able to see everything you have in your pantry.

3. Keep Canned Goods Together

Canned goods store very well on top of each other. For this reason, keep all your canned items together on one shelf. However, you should organize the canned goods according to use and ingredients. For instance, condensed milk should be with the canned pureed pumpkin, not with the canned soup.

4. Hang an Erasable Board

Hang a chalkboard or whiteboard next to your kitchen pantry to keep track of items you’re running low on. This way you’ll never be out of an essential ingredient for a recipe you want to make. 

5. Store Less-Used Items 

Less-used items like turkey roasting pans or stock pots either up high or down low. This will keep all the eye-level shelves available for the items you use most often. 

6. Install a Push Button Light

Inexpensive push button lights at each shelf will help you to see items inside your kitchen pantry. These lights can easily adhere to pantry walls or below the shelf above. 

These five kitchen pantry storage ideas will help make your Flagstaff, AZ apartments even more of a joy to cook in. To see the kitchen pantries in person, please contact us today.

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Flagstaff apartments

4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Apartment Life

1. Use the Swimming Pool

It’s a wonderful treat to be able to go for a swim any time you want to. In Flagstaff, the temperatures are warm enough to enjoy the swimming most of the year. The pool is a gathering place where everyone will go to relax or spend time with friends. The swimming pool offers not only a way to cool off, but also to meet your apartment home neighbors.

2. Utilize the Fitness Center

Having an on-site fitness center in your Flagstaff apartments complex is a huge benefit. For one thing, you’ll be able to get your workout in even when the weather is inclement. For another, you’ll be able to save a bundle because you won’t have to purchase a gym membership at some facility far away. Double win!

3. Engage in Resident Events

The management at your apartments in Flagstaff go out of their way to organize resident events. These events provide an easy way to meet neighbors who you might not see otherwise. Making social connections adds to the enjoyment of life overall, and it’s even better when you know your new friends live close by!

4. Visit the Playground

If you have youngsters, the playground facilities offer the chance to get kids outside in the fresh air and sunshine. You’ll be able to give your kids the opportunity to enhance their social skills while meeting fellow parents yourself. You never know if you might meet someone with whom you can share babysitting favors!

When you live in Flagstaff apartments, there are so many tremendous amenities to avail yourself of. Why not contact us today to find out all the benefits you can get from living here? We look forward to meeting you!

The post 4 Ways to Get the Most Out of Apartment Life appeared first on Country Club Vista Apartments Blog.

Easy Breakfasts for Your Flagstaff Apartment Entertaining

• Strata. A strata looks complex but is actually very easy. Place four slices of your favorite bread in a square casserole dish. Beat four eggs with 1/2 cup milk and add salt, pepper and seasoning to taste. Pour this over the bread. Sprinkle with diced Canadian bacon and refrigerate overnight. Bake uncovered in a 350-degree oven for 30 minutes. Top with cheese and cook for 5 to 10 more minutes until strata is firm and golden. You have a delicious, simple breakfast casserole that feeds several with very little effort!

• Bacon for a Crowd. You can easily make bacon for a crowd in your oven. Place slices of uncooked bacon in your cold oven on a cookie sheet. Turn the temperature to 450 and keep an eye on things. In around 10 to 12 minutes, your bacon should be crisp and ready to go. Drain and you’ve got bacon for a crowd.

• Bagel Bar. Serve bagels with a variety of toppings including butter, cream cheese, cheese, fried eggs, Canadian bacon and peanut butter. Everyone can create the breakfast that suits their needs, and you can relax and enjoy good company.

Having a nice big kitchen and dining area can make serving these morning meals even easier. Check out our currently available apartments in Flagstaff at Country Club Vista Apartments and schedule a walkthrough today. We’d love to show you our currently available floor plans and see if one works for you.

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We walk through the rooms of a storm soaked apartment in Houston, Texas, as Mary, a twenty-plus-year resident of Nob Hill Apartments, points out the items she hopes she can keep, but we can clearly see are lost. The safety masks covering our mouths and noses do nothing to block the rank smell of stagnant flood water and growing mold. The air in the apartment is warm and humid, the air outside buzzing with mosquitos preying on the exposed skin of anyone walking through the community working to salvage what they can from the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Even with the flood waters receded, we feel the sense of loss that weighs heavy as a storm cloud over the apartment community we’ve come to serve.

We try to prepare Mary for the worst—the disheartening fact that most of her worldly possessions must be declared casualties of the hurricane’s destructive force. But Mary’s determination outweighs our own, and pushes us in a new direction. Where we strive to prepare her for despair, she insists upon building us up with hope. And as we tell her we will help her as best we can, she leaves us with these words: “When I was a child, my teacher told me that the good deeds you do are added as stars to your crown in heaven. Your crowns are going to be full of all the stars in the heavens.”

***

Our group of volunteers left Arizona in the early hours of September 6 to make our way to Houston. Our team was made up of multifamily housing team members from Bella Investment Group in Flagstaff, AZ, who had committed to partner with Apartment Life, an organization that places CARES Teams within apartment communities to “look for ways to love their neighbors as themselves.” We have often seen the outpouring of love CARES Teams deliver to the residents of our Bella communities—now was our chance to take the CARES mission upon ourselves and make a difference in the lives of those impacted by Hurricane Harvey.

After spending Wednesday evening assembling and loading U-Haul trucks with Resident Recovery Kits, we headed into the community on Thursday to see where we could help. As we approached Nob Hill Apartments, a 1300+ unit apartment community situated on Brays Bayou in the Meyerland suburb, we saw streets lined with debris and abandoned furniture, clothing, toys, even cars—all casualties of the surging flood waters. Nob Hill is where we met Mary, along with dozens of other residents who were packing up what they could to leave the community many of them called home. We expected the despair in the faces of the people of the community to match the destruction we saw in the streets. But where we expected despair, we saw hope.

One of the first young men we spoke to assured us that he had not been hit “too bad” by Harvey’s destructive power. “For me, it wasn’t as bad as for other folks,” he told us as we walked through one section of Nob Hill. “Other people got it much worse.” I learned later that for him, “not too bad” meant he “only” lost his car and about half of the possessions in his apartment. He counted himself lucky, despite his losses, and assured us that now that he knew we were there, he would help us find people who needed more help than he did. And he was true to his word. He eagerly came to us with the names and addresses of neighbors who could “really use your help,” and seemed overjoyed to be what he considered a “small part” of our work. The misery we expected seemed to have receded with the flood waters, and in its place love, humanity, and hope had blossomed.

For the CARES team in Houston, the Relief Kits and resources they handed out seemed like only a “drop in the bucket” of the recovery that needed to be done in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. An office team member, who had been pulled from a different property to assist at Nob Hill, described her efforts of pointing residents toward resources and gathering contact information from those who needed to move as “a drop in the bucket” compared to what she felt the people around her needed and the losses she knew they had endured. Even as we gave resources, monies, and hugs to those we met, we began to say that we knew it was only “a drop in the bucket” for those who had lost so much so quickly.

Yet the enduring power of hope outshined our perspective. The more people we met, the more we got the sense that in creating for themselves a sense of normalcy even among lost possessions, abandoned homes, and more, the residents of this community were finding something beyond the despair we saw on the news. Make no mistake—there remains much to be done to restore what has been lost in these communities devastated by the storms. But even beyond the knowledge of loss is the hope of helping hands. We saw donations from across the country pooled together to fan the flames of this hope. We witnessed police cars lining the streets from around the country to lend aid and relief to first responders who had not yet even had the chance to assess and accept their personal losses. We saw barbecue fundraisers and Red Cross vans delivering lunches and dinners on a daily basis where they were needed most. We saw neighbor reaching out to neighbor to lighten each other’s loads. And we saw tears of sorrow become tears of joy as people heard how far folks had come to help.

“To help me?” one woman said to me, stepping back in shock from a tight hug when I told her we had flown in from Arizona. “Y’all came all this way just to help me?”

“We know it’s just a drop in the bucket,” I found myself saying, but she cut me off.

“A drop in the bucket?” she gasped, clasping my hands in her own. “Child, it’s the whole ocean!”

I left Houston with news of the impending impact of Hurricane Irma ringing in the background on every television set we passed from our hotel lobby to the airport terminal. In the shadows of yet another destructive storm, it’s hard to ignore that there remains so much need along the Gulf Coast as residents there work to rebuild. Hurricane Harvey’s impact will be felt in this area for months, if not years, to come.

But even in the shadows of these destructive storms crashing upon our shores and cities, we see the silver linings illuminated by the selfless acts of people who keep their heads held high, their spirits lifted, and the hopes of their communities blazing against the dark times ahead. We can all be a part of bringing hope to these communities. Apartment Life continues to raise funds for relief efforts for both Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma. The Red Cross continues to step up their efforts to prepare and provide relief. Countless other organizations are out there, waiting for each of us to step up and impact lives by being beacons of hope in the midst of despair.

Please join us in supporting the ongoing relief efforts, and make your own "drop in the bucket" contribution to those impacted by this year's hurricane storms:

Donations for Apartment Life Harvey Relief Kits: https://tiny.cc/alharvey

Donations for Apartment Life Irma Relief Kits: https://tiny.cc/alirma

The post Beacons of Hope in the Midst of Despair: A Local Hurricane Harvey Relief Story appeared first on Country Club Vista Apartments Blog.

Easy

Buffalo Park Trail. This 2-mile easy loop starts and ends at Buffalo Park trailhead. To get there from US 180, go east on Forest Ave. to N. Gemini Rd. to the park entrance and trailhead.

Fort Tuthill Trail. Covering 6.6 miles, this trail is accessible from April – October and is rated as "easy".  Find this urban trailhead just west of Northern Arizona University off of Milton Road.

Moderate

Kachina Trail. The Kachina trail, rated as moderate, is primarily used by hikers and is accessible from May – November. Covering 10.4 miles, this out and back trail can be accessed by traveling 7.4 miles Northwest from Flagstaff on US 180 and turning north on SnowBowl Road for about 7 miles. 

Dry Lake Hills Trail. This moderately difficult trail is a 5.5-mile loop is accessible from either Schultz Pass Road or Eldon Lookout Road. To get there, take US 180 North to Schultz Pass Road (FR 420.)

Difficult

Weatherford Trail. Accessible from March – November, this 15.6-mile (out and back) trail is challenging, but beautiful. Used by hikers, walkers, nature lovers and bird-watchers alike, get to the trail by going north on US 180 to Schultz Pass Rd (FR 420). Turn left at FR 557 and continue for 6 miles to the trailhead.

The Flagstaff, Arizona, area is truly a hiker's paradise. To learn more about the Country Club Vista Apartments in Flagstaff, contact our office today by calling (866) 941-5434.

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If you want peace and quiet:

1. Find a quiet picnic table or sitting bench at one of Flagstaff's neighborhood, community or regional parks. With 26 different options, you will never tire of your surroundings. 

2. Studying at the library is tried and true, and if you want peace and quiet along with plenty of workspace and climate control, then you should definitely consider the Flagstaff City/Coconino County Library. The main branch is across from City Hall and next to Wheeler Park, and is open until 9 PM several nights each week.

If you don't mind some background noise:

3. Check out any one of 15 locally owned coffee shops in Flagstaff. With free wi-fi, delicious beverages and snacks and friendly personnel, studying or working remotely won't seem like such a chore. 

4. Find a bench at Heritage Square Trust in downtown Flagstaff. When the outdoor amphitheater isn't bustling with free concerts or other activities, the benches at Heritage Square can be a peaceful place to enjoy the outdoors while hitting the books. 

If you want to stick close to home:

5. No list would be complete without mentioning the amazing business center, clubhouse or picnic gazebo available to residents of Country Club Vista apartments in Flagstaff. You may even want to study by the pool to make your study breaks extra refreshing. 

There are many places to study in Flagstaff. To learn more about all of the community's amenities, contact the office today at 866-941-5434.

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