On Saturday we finally found a house that felt right to us. It’s around the 30 year old mark and will need a little work to finish it off, but it’s the only house we’ve been in so far that just felt familiar to me. I usually get a feeling about the houses I’m going to live in and this one was very familiar. Walking across the backyard in the vicinity of the clothes line felt very, very familiar for some reason. Can’t imagine why! ;)

It would need some renovations to the kitchen and the bathroom as they’re a little old; in good nick, but old. Same goes for the carpet: good nick, but old and not our style. Few little things like that and general maintenance, but overall not too bad. At least it wouldn’t require fixing somebody else’s botched up renovation job like some many houses we’ve seen. They get the idea in their head that a “feature wall” would be a great idea to squeeze some extra dollars out of people so they splash some paint on one wall, and by splash I mean splash! Most of those houses have paint splashed on the skirting boards, on the lightswitches, everywhere. Utter mess and not even a good painting job on the actual wall. Then there are the wooden floorboards disasters. Just because you have wooden floors under your carpet doesn’t necessarily mean they were meant to be walked on directly. 9 times out of 10 it just ends up making them creak and groan abysmally until you’re worried that you’ll crash through the floor. It’s worse when they don’t bother to polish them and try to bill the house as “partially renovated”. Great - you ripped off your carpet, did a bad paint job on a couple of walls and we’re supposed to pay extra for that shoddy work? No thanks.

*ahem* Please excuse the rant. I’ve seen so many houses like this that I’m literally going crazy. Anyway, the one we like (and have put an offer in on!) is a nice, solid house that we can renovate the way we like it: correctly. After all, we’re going to be living there for the next several years (I hope!) so doing a good job that will last is definitely in our best interests.

Ben’s checking with the agents today to see what’s happening. It’s unlikely they’ll take our first offer, but it’s also unlikely to go for much more than that. It is on a relatively busy road (because it connects up to two actual main roads) which makes it a little noisy, but this is Canberra and the noise never lasts for long. There are ways to fix it so that the car noises won’t make it inside the house either which we’ll take care of before we move in. The good news about the busy road thing is that there is literally a bus stop next to the house; the house next door actually. How easy is that?

So today I’m just waiting and hoping and crossing fingers. I’m going to need to see a chiropractor after all this is over to straighten my fingers out!

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