Project Casserole: the DIY files

Hi everyone. I hope you've all been well and staying warm  – here in the UK, in London, on the 4th of April, it snowed. SNOWED. I'm sick of the winter now and am really desperate for spring.

The other thing I'm desperate for is my house renovation to be complete. I know I promised to keep you up to date with our progress, but it all happened so fast that on the Tuesday after my birthday I left for work and came home to this:

It's been over three weeks now without a kitchen, and frankly, I think we were a bit naive. We really just thought they'd take down the wall separating our kitchen and our living room and that would be it. But they also reinforced the structural support in the ceiling (so our bed doesn't end up on our sofa).

And they re-routed the pipes, which went through the wall we removed, and moved our boiler to the opposite wall which helped with the plumbing being made all nice and tidy. They also extended this wall, so that we could put more cabinets on it. This is really only exciting if you're into plumbing and plastering.

While all of this work was going on, my living room looked like this:

And everything, I mean EVERYTHING, was covered in dust. We spent most of our time in the loft, sitting on mattresses from the spare bed, watching tv from the iPad via the Apple TV. It was like being a student, in a squat, only we own it. Weird.

At the end of the 10 days our workers were in, this is what we were left with:

On the left there, that new door is my coat closet. I fought The Irishman very hard for that closet, and I'm very excited for it. This is my life now: excitement about built in storage. But the space is open plan now, and feels light and airy and BIG.

Obviously you can see that the flooring is gone; our kitchen had tiles and the rest of the ground floor was a laminated wood. We decided to put wood down on the whole floor, and went with engineered wood – and decided to save money by installing it ourselves. It arrived last Thursday, in time for our Easter Bank Holiday DIY-athon Weekend.

This is what they call "curbside delivery." You have to heft it into the house YOURSELF. I was the lucky one who worked from home that day and had to do it – all 28 boxes.

And here is the wood, and all of our DIY supplies bright and early last Friday. We covered a lot last weekend – filling in holes, removing the decorative woodwork, sanding, priming, painting, and laying over half of the flooring. We are finishing the flooring this weekend, and installing most of the kitchen cabinets along with the new oven (which arrives tomorrow) so we will have a pretty much functional kitchen AGAIN for the first time in nearly a month. We'll post photos of the nearly complete space next week – and in the meantime, if you have any tips about countertops or tiles, we'd really appreciate it!

Til next time... xx

House Week Part 6: The Fine Print

To wrap up House Week, the last piece of the puzzle to put in place is how we made the house ours. As I said yesterday, we saw the house in late April and it piqued our interest. We saw it on a rainy day and it felt so cozy, and unlike anything we'd seen before, that it really stuck with us. So we scheduled a second viewing for the next week to see it again and decide whether or not it was something we were serious about. After that second viewing, we called the estate agent and made our initial offer.

The offer was of course rejected, and we decided to take a different tack than our previous property negotiations; we basically decided what our highest offer would be and just went in with that. If the seller ended up wanting more, we would walk away. The agent took our offer to the seller and she accepted it, but with the condition that she was waiting to hear on an offer of a property she wanted in Wales. If she didn't get the property, she might not sell the house at all. We went into the first Bank Holiday weekend on tenterhooks, waiting for a call letting us know whether there would be a deal – or not.

The Irishman got a call the next Tuesday from the estate agent, and it turned out that the seller didn't get that particular house in Wales... but she wanted to go through with the sale! We were ecstatic, but had been burned before, so we just quickly went into business mode to lock down the purchase. We called our lawyer, got him in touch with the seller's lawyer, and started talking about the possible dates for exchanging the sale contract and completing the sale, and we spoke to our mortgage broker about getting the load finalised. The seller was moving to Wales for personal reasons, and needed to be in a new home fairly soon, so she wanted to hurry the purchase along as quickly as she could. We were happy with that, but knew nothing would be final until the exchange of contracts; exchange, as it's called, is the moment the sale becomes legally binding – until that point, either party could pull out of the sale with no financial penalty. Luckily for us, the seller wanted the house listing pulled from the estate agent's offices and websites so that any sellers of homes in Wales couldn't track her sale and find out how much money she would be getting. This was good for us because it meant there was little chance of us being gazumped - that is, somebody else coming along and offering more for the house and pulling it out from under us.

The next steps for us consisted of a lot of waiting. The lawyer proceeded to conduct a document search on the property with Hackney council; this is to make sure there aren't any series legal issues with the house itself (liens against it, all works were conducted safely, etc). These searches tend to take around 2 weeks, but unfortunately for us Hackney's computerized system went down over Christmas 2011 and probably STILL hasn't been fixed. They advised us there would be delays as the searches had to be performed manually and there was a significant backlog.

Meanwhile our mortgage broker came back to us with good and bad news: the good news was that there were several good deals going on mortgages, fixing low interest rates for up to 5 years even for buyers putting down low deposits. We wanted to go with a fixed rate for stability. Even though mortgages are really cheap on tracker loans that follow the Bank of England base rate, we wanted to know exactly what our monthly outgoings were going to be for a set period of time. As we were putting down a 15% deposit and will need to repay our respective parents for the loans, we wanted to be sure that we could afford to do both in the event of a dramatic interest rate rise should the economy pick up.

The bad news our mortgage broker had for us was that we probably weren't eligible for any of those deals given my non-resident status. When we first started working with this broker, he was confident that given my length of stay in the UK, my job, my salary, etc, we wouldn't have a problem being accepted for a mortgage. We easily got an AIP for a hefty sum early on in the process with Halifax, which is considered a good lender and made us look like excellent prospects as buyers to estate agents. However when it came to shopping around for the best deal on mortgages, I was considered a risk or "an exception" for many banks and lenders. Our broker was good at knowing which banks we couldn't approach at all (Santander) and which ones he might be able to sneak us through using his connections (Northern Rock). But at the end of the day, because of the lack of lending in the market overall and the volume of mortgage applications being submitted for good deals, most banks were not reviewing exceptions and we weren't able to take advantage of the deals. We ended up getting our mortgage with Halifax, which is apparently the only bank who will lend to non-permanent residents, with an interest rate at least 1.5% more than the next option.

I wasn't pleased, to be honest, because I felt like my expat status was again costing me more to do normal life things. The Irishman genuinely rued that he hadn't asked me to marry him sooner so that we could save money on our mortgage (romantic), because all the bank wanted was a piece of paper I am 6 months away from obtaining. We actually located a specialist Tier 1 immigrant mortgage broker for a second opinion, and he kindly reviewed our offer and basically said to go with it as he couldn't get us anything better. At this point, we were under quite a lot of pressure to finalise the mortgage because the mortgage company needs to perform a survey of the house before the loan is agreed and the seller hadn't had the surveyor come through yet. Her lawyer started chasing us up, worried that the sale wouldn't go through, and we had to fast-track the mortgage process to reassure her we were committed.

Once the loan went through, we basically spent the summer waiting. We didn't hear from Hackney council on the searches until the end of July and when we did we got bad news: there were concerns over the legality of some of the building works that had been done to the house (things that were the reasons we were buying the house). So again, we had to again while the seller and her lawyer investigated the issues. It wasn't 100% resolved for us, but the seller took out an insurance policy for us that protects us against the loss of value of the property if something were to go wrong. Our lawyer advised us that was good enough, and we moved forward with the sale.

Because of the seller's timeframes in trying to move into a new place quickly in Wales, we had to fast forward the sale process bigtime after all of the delays during May, June, and July. We exchanged contracts around the first of August, and completed on the 10th. Usually people exchange contracts and have a longish wait to move into their home; we had 10 days to pack up and move! We also only had 10 days to transfer funds globally. Because we weren't sure whether the sale would go forward, I didn't move money from the US until we were locked into the sale. I had money in mutual funds and an IRA, the latter of which I will have to pay a tax penalty on for emptying before a certain age, and I didn't want to incur those penalities unnecessarily. So I liquidated those accounts and then had to figure out the quickest and least expensive way to get the funds from the US to the UK. I ended up writing my dad a check for the money, and he had Bank of America wire all of the funds to me in the UK – there was a $25 charge, I think, and it arrived in 3 days. I also had to go to the bank I had an ISA with in the UK to transfer the balance; the sum was too big to do online or over the phone.

At this point, all of the money becomes funny money; the number of zeros is laughable and the value is more as quantities on a spreadsheet rather than actual money you own. It's a weird feeling. Especially because the money is just going going going every which way. Here's a short list of the funds you need to proved on the day you complete the sale:

• Down payment (15% of total agreed house price)
• Stamp duty (3% of total agreed house price – this is in addition to the price of the house)
• Mortgage fee (the price you pay for the privilege of getting a mortgage, around £1000)
• Lawyer's fees

Like I said, funny money – you get rather blasé about the whole thing after a while, probably as a coping mechanism for dealing with the sheer amount of money you're spending in one fell swoop.

The day we completed the sale, I thought I would be giddy and feel some sort of amazing relief. But I had a rather busy day at work and The Irishman cycled to the estate agent's office to get the keys alone. I met him after work and we immediately went to IKEA to buy a bed for our guest room, as we needed something to sleep on for the first few weeks until our new bed arrived. I had dreams of doing the whole "Chinese takeout sitting on boxes with cheap champagne" romantic new homeowner moment, but we didn't have time! We had to finish packing so we could move into our new home the very next morning.

So there you have it! That's how we bought our home. Friends of mine in the US tell me this process is so different from how it's done in America but I have nothing to compare this experience with. Obviously I learned a lot about the UK property market and house buying process, so if you have any questions please feel free to post them in the comments or email me personally.

House Week Part 5: finding our place

Apologies to everyone for not posting this yesterday; I typically find my time to blog right before lunch at work and yesterday it just didn't happen. So without further ado, let's jump straight into how we got this here house I'm sitting in right now.

I mentioned on Thursday that towards the end of March The Irishman and I were getting rather fed up with the whole house search process. I had been hearing ridiculous stories from people at work about searches that went on for years, people finding a street they loved and stalking it, waiting for a home to come up for sale, and even flyering the street asking if anyone was considering selling so they could buy exactly the right house exactly where they wanted. The Irishman and I were horrified at the thought of continuing to look for a place for years, let alone months; we'd only been at it for 3 months and it already felt like a lifetime.

In mid-April we went to the US for a bit – me for 10 days, to see my family, and then to Florida for a wedding where The Irishman met me – and we chilled out. A lot. While we were away, the second granny house fell through and we both sort of just, I don't know, gained perspective I guess. We had been making this such a big thing, pinning all of our happiness and future plans on this ephemeral perfect house, and being amongst my friends celebrating a marriage made us realize that we were probably just making it a lot harder than it needed to be. We also realized that we were approaching the search from a "forever house" perspective; this is a term you hear quite a lot in the UK, which is sort of interchangeable with "family house," but essentially means the house you plan to spend most of your life in, raise your kids in, and really commit to. Our house was going to be the beginning – for a while, sure, but not forever – and thus it didn't need to have EVERYTHING. This was a biggie for me, this epiphany, and it helped me reconcile a lot of the issues I was having with finding exactly what I wanted in our price range... because it didn't have to have it all. It just had to have enough for both of us to be happy.

So we returned to the UK and made a bunch more appointments for viewings, intent on not letting the search take over our lives. The very next weekend, we saw what is now our house. The Irishman remarked to me as we walked up to the place that he was surprised I wanted to see this place; he had seen the listing and didn't think it was something I would be interested in, but I was intrigued and we had made a booking anyway. Afterwards when I was describing the house to a friend, she said I talked about it in a very different way to all of the other houses. She didn't say why, but she said this one sounded different. This all sounds a bit like dating, no?

And actually, it is exactly like that. You think you want something very specific in a partner and then you meet someone who makes you realize that actually, you don't need some of those things to be happy. So with this house, I didn't get a lot of things I wanted but I love it just the same.

To begin with, it's a modern build house. You might remember that on Wednesday I said that I didn't want a modern build, but I think I didn't want a house that felt overtly modern; I didn't want a house where everything was slick and soulless. This house was built as part of a mews development in the 1980s, and it looks like a cottage. It is set down a dead-end lane off of a main road, in between Church Street in Stoke Newington and Dalston Kingsland Overground station. The lane has a gate at the end, and when the gate is closed you feel like you're in another world, not in the middle of busy Hackney.

There is a garden, more like a patio, that is south facing and is a suntrap for most of the day. The kitchen is pretty old, and it separate from the rest of the ground floor so it will be the first thing we renovate (more on that very soon). The master bedroom is huge, and has a big closet (as does the spare bedroom). There is a huge walk in closet off the hallway which I would love to use as a small laundry room if possible. The bathroom is okay, not great, but will suffice until we get around to redo-ing it.

The main attraction of this specific house is that it has a converted loft, so we have 2 full bedrooms plus another room that can be whatever we like. Initial plans are to make it a hangout room for The Irishman, where he can watch sports unimpeded, and also where I can have my sewing machine and art stuff. But maybe it could be expanded further to make it the master bedroom, with an ensuite bathroom. The possibilities are endless, really.

And I think that's in the end what sold us on the house – the fact that there weren't limitations to it, rather tons of things we could do to it. Instead of having to worry about the roof, or updating the electrics, we can go straight into cosmetic improvements like putting in a new open-plan kitchen. The house was constructed in such a way that all of the load-bearing walls are on the perimeters, so any of the rooms can be reconfigured fairly easily. We don't need to get planning permission for most upgrades, as it's not listed, and The Irishman is confident he can do most of the DIY work himself to save money. With a period property, we wouldn't have been able to do too much ourselves as we would have had to consider the codes and restoration before even thinking about wallcolors.

What didn't I get? A fireplace, to start. Lovely plasterwork cornices and ceiling details. Original internal shutters in windows. The joy of having a piece of history. But as I said, these are things I can live without. Instead, I got something that we are already, 2 months in, making our own, making work for us and how we want to live where we want to live. And that in itself is priceless.

So I've just reread this and realized that I told you all about our place but not how it ended up becoming ours. I'll need to give you that in part 6 tomorrow. Stay tuned!

House Week Part 4: Offers and Decisions

After reading yesterday's post, if you thought that finding houses to see was bad, imagine what it was like trying to decide which one you liked enough to buy! Buying a house isn't as easy as simply walking in to Macy's or M&S, trying on a pair of shoes, deciding whether they fit, go with your outfit, and are good value, and simply taking them to the register to pay. Each property we saw was unique, and we went through a complex set of negotiations and emotions individually and separately to come to a decision about whether to make an offer on a specific one.

The process is something like this:

• See a property – viewings tend to be around 15-20 minutes, shorter if you hate it, longer if you love it
• Decide whether you like it enough to see it again
• Schedule a second viewing
• Make an offer
• Negotiate
• Either your offer is accepted or rejected

But the process is rarely that straightforward. Sometimes an estate agent shows you around. Sometimes the owner shows you around. Sometimes you see something in pictures that you love and when you walk inside you hate it. Little things about a place can colour your opinion; I remember this one maisonette had this tiny little bathroom off a stairway landing, and I refused to consider buying it because of that one particular feature. Sometimes you'll go away to think about the house and call the estate agent back and find out it's already gone, just hours after you saw it. Sometimes you'll see something and it will make you reconsider what you thought you wanted. The whole thing is so subjective that you really have no idea what you want until you see it.

The Irishman and I made offers on 3 houses before we ended up in the one we eventually bought. Two of them were what I called "granny" houses; these are period houses that have been lived in by families for the past 4-5 decades and haven't been updated since about 1965. The generation of my grandmother is still living in their homes, often widowed, and can no longer keep up the house. The upside of these treasure troves is that you can get them quite cheaply compared to properties that have been recently redone as buyers would go into them, have a look at the horrid wallpaper, and think "I don't want to do this job." We wanted to do that job, so we hoped to find an amazing home at a fraction of the price. The downside of these homes is that often there was a decade or so of neglect, and you got what you paid for; roofs, floors, even whole electric wiring systems had to be replaced in both houses we made offers on before we could even move into them.

We lost both of those houses, one because someone offered £35,000 more than we did and the other because even though we offered more than the other party they were a cash buyer – nothing trumps a first-time buyer besides a cash buyer. In both cases, in retrospect we were glad that we didn't end up with those homes. The sheer amount of money we would have had to pour into them to renovate them up to a liveable standard – just liveable, not even to a specific design aesthetic – would have exhausted all of our resources for the foreseeable future. We both borrowed funds from our respective parents for our downpayment (more on that tomorrow) and it's already looking tight to pay that back; had we gotten either granny house, we wouldn't have seen either of those parents for quite a few years we'd be so cash strapped.

The third property we offered on was a ground floor maisonette that featured a 70' south-facing back garden. When you start shopping for a house, you start to learn things like south-facing gardens are the best because they get light all day and into the evening; west-facing is a close second but doesn't have the morning sun, and north-facing gardens are the worst. So this lovely garden was full of grass and flower beds and even had a shed in the back! The rooms were a good size and the kitchen opened into a lovely sitting room with a great big fireplace. The downstairs bedrooms were just okay; I felt like I would have wanted to knock down all of the walls and redo them because they were all odd sizes. The third bedroom wasn't even really a bedroom, more of a study, but would have been okay for sewing. We made on offer on that house that was initially accepted but then the estate agent called back ten minutes later to say someone else had offered more so they were going into a closed bid: highest price won the house. Despited being convinced the jerk estate agent actually called another interested party to tell them the house was going at a certain price, we quickly scheduled a second viewing to decide how high we were going to go with our bid. On closer inspection we decided that actually we really didn't like the house that much, and it wasn't worth more than the prices that had been rejected. We decided not to bid on it, and let it go.

At one point around the end of March / early April, we got pretty down about the whole process. We'd lost out at two homes by now and were bickering over the houses we were seeing. I was ready to jump at anything, and could see potential of homes slightly out of our geographic area that needed quite a bit of work. The Irishman was leaning more towards smaller places in the heart of Stokey, and I was getting upset at him rejecting properties with seeming no rhyme or reason. After a few particularly gnarly fights, I was lamenting about the process to a friend of mine at work who shared her story of how she and her partner found their home. She said they put together an evaluation sheet that helped them both independently and objectively evaluate whether the house was someplace we really wanted to live in and make our own. I mulled on this and created the following form for us to fill out based on our core criteria and a few other mandatories that had emerged throughout the search:

  

Using this checklist really helped us turn a corner in the search, because all of a sudden it wasn't him vs me, or me vs him, but an actual score we could discuss. It turned out that some things I originally thought were really important actually weren't in the grand scheme of things, and it helped The Irishman see what I valued the most. For all of the properties we used the checklist with, we were never more than 5 points apart. We just needed the vehicle to help us talk about the houses rationally.

I've left the best for last – the house we bought and now live in! I'll tell you about it tomorrow, along with the wretched process of actually finalizing the sale. 

House Week Part 3: Dealing with estate agents, or the worst people I've ever met in my entire life but who have the power to make or break your spirit

This clip says it all. The stereotypes are true. Estate agents are wankers.

Once we decided on Stoke Newington as our prime neighborhood to focus on in our property search, and agreed our criteria for the property itself, we started to actually look for a house. Instrumental in our search was RightMove, which has handy filters and updates constantly. Once we set our price range, bedroom numbers, and location, we constantly trolled through the listings to see what was out there.

The bad news was, not much. The credit crunch stalled the rise in house prices across the UK and while London properties maintained most of their value, home owners realized they wouldn't make the big gains by selling earlier in the year and instead starting investing in their properties rather than upgrading. So we would go for weeks when only 1-2 new properties would appear for sale each week and the rest of the listings were old news. That was a pretty depressing time, as it felt like we'd never even see anything we liked that we could afford.


We also registered with estate agents representing properties in Stoke Newington to get on their radars. This consisted of us walking down Church Street, looking in the windows of all of the estate agent offices at the properties they claimed to have on the market, and going in for a chat. We would sit in each estate agent's office and tell them our price range, criteria, what type of property we wanted (period property! no new builds! please God NO EX-COUNCIL PROPERTIES!!!) and outline our own situation; being first time buyers with a decent deposit and rolling month-to-month rental contract made us attractive as buyers as we were flexible. We learned that being chain-free (ie, not having a house to sell to release funds to buy our next property) was a really helpful trump card – I actually came to protect that status, not wanting to waste the opportunity. We would always get a great spiel from the estate agent about how we would find something we would love, how they had so many properties for us, and how everything would just be great.

We kept that optimism as we started going to viewings. Those first viewings tended to be lovely period properties converted to maisonettes – a two-story flat that is either the top or bottom half or a house. As we wanted a garden, we would see bottom floor maisonettes where you entered on the ground floor to the living areas and kitchen and then go downstairs to the bedrooms. What really shocked me about these properties was that they were listed at pretty high prices, not much difference in price to full houses, and often had weird conversion elements that made me think "why did they decide to do THAT?!". I often felt, looking at those maisonette flats, that I would be paying a lot to fix someone else's mistakes.

The other shocker about these properties was that because of the overall lack of properties coming onto the market, everything was in high demand. We were introduced to the "open house" fairly early, when we would be booked in to view a property at 2pm or whatever and show up to find at least 3 other couples milling around the place. It was disheartening as my competitive nature kicked in and we could tell the other couples were sizing us up as foes. It was also pretty depressing because 99% of the time, the other couples were either pregnant OR already had at least one kid. Too many times we walked up to see a property and tripped over a line of strollers parked outside. How can you compete with a bunch of couples who clearly need extra bedrooms for their children when you just want extra rooms for hosting guests and a sewing machine?

After seeing a few of these maisonettes, we saw our first full house and promptly fell in love. I blogged about it here, and the experience of seeing a proper 2 bed house fully intact made me realize that I just couldn't compromise on the idea of a HOUSE. So when estate agents would call with a maisonette or a flat, we would really grill them on what it was like; there's no point in seeing something that wasn't within our core criteria. I can't even tell you how many times I would get a call saying "Hey, we've got something we KNOW you'll love, you HAVE to see it!" and within a few minutes I'd find out that it was actually only a one-bed, didn't have a garden, wasn't in the area we were looking. Even worse, we would go and see properties and the estate agent would say that actually the price hadn't been set yet and so we'd see it, like it, and find out it was about £50-75,000 over what we could afford.

The worst estate agent move we experienced, though, was at the hands of Location Location. I'm publicly shaming them because we know they employed dirty tactics and eventually I refused to see houses they represented because of their horrendous service. We saw the first full house with them and they held our offer back from the owner in the hopes that someone would offer more, and when they did pass the offer on to the owners we're sure they counselled the owners not to accept it. But they also used us in the opposite way, by calling me to tell me they had this GREAT property I HAD to see, but someone was interested in it and about to make an offer so I should see it RIGHT AWAY so I wouldn't be disappointed. But it didn't have a garden, didn't have a full second bedroom, and I realized that the estate agent just wanted me to go in and make an offer to inflate the price for the other poor buyer! When I turned down a viewing of another property they called me about, the estate agent actually lectured me about how property prices in Stoke Newington were rising, that I probably couldn't afford what I wanted, and I was "going to have to start compromising at some point." Her behavior was so rude that I just started avoiding her calls.

So I guess the bottom line is, we ended up having to be really proactive. Good stuff was going fast – if you saw something Saturday that you liked, you had to book in a second viewing Monday morning or risk the property going under offer that afternoon and missing out. Crap stuff was lingering on the market and the phone calls we would get were flogging stuff we'd seen on RightMove for weeks. Often times, we'd call estate agents asking to see properties they themselves hadn't actually seen because they literally would have been put up on Rightmove moments ago. It was pretty cutthroat, and oftentimes disheartening. On the flipside, we had so many estate agents cancel viewings a half-hour before the appointment, or not show up, that it was hard to not just throw up our hands in disgust and just stay on in our tiny little rental flat.

But eventually, we did find diamonds amongst the rough. Tomorrow, I'll tell you about how it came down to negotiating the offer stage – both for ourselves, how we decided to make an offer, and how the actual process of making an offer went down.

Houseweek Part 2: deciding on a neighborhood

Image courtesy of Londonist

So the thing about buying a house is that it starts out really exciting and full of possibilities, runs through stress and anxiety before ending in desperation. That's the dirty secret no one tells you about. But before we go through the full cycle of emotions, let's start at the sunny beginning and the search – specifically for a neighborhood.

Once we met with the mortgage broker and had an idea of the gargantuan loan we would easily be able to obtain, we started to frame our priorities for our home search. It's an important distinction to talk about homes instead of houses, because we very quickly learned that properties ticking all of the boxes simply weren't "right" for us for reasons that weren't easily explained. Creating a criteria of absolutes helped framed conversation and debate about properties we viewed, but still allowed for personal preference and gut feel to live side-by-side.

Our initial criteria was:

• at least 2 bedrooms, ideally 2.5 (at this point The Irishman was working from home, and we wanted him to have an office separate from a spare bedroom)
• garden with decent sun
• open plan living/dining area
• decent closet space
• 1.5-2 bathrooms
• room for improvement, i.e., not a recently renovated place so that we could do some DIY and customise the place
• ideally a full house

With that list in hand, we started looking at property listings online in our then-current neighborhood. It quickly became apparent that we weren't going to be able to afford much more than a 1 or 2 bed flat in N1, and to be honest we weren't surprised or upset. For a few months we had started lamenting the crowds on Upper Street, the amount of street noise and rowdy Friday/Saturday night crowds, and the over-gentrification of the area. At some point, when there are 5 burrito joints within a quarter mile, you start to realise that a neighborhood is headed down a path that doesn't sync with your own. So we started investigating neighborhoods boarding Angel. We were relatively open about the neighborhood itself, but The Irishman had two non-negotiables: decent transport links (at least a few night buses and one train station) and safety (so if he was away and I was walking home late at night, he wouldn't worry).

I think this is a really interesting point: we started from the idea of what we wanted our house to feel like, rather than the neighborhood where we wanted to live. If we had started in the reverse, I think we would have compromised a lot in terms of what we wanted from the property itself and probably wouldn't be as happy.

We investigated quite a lot of areas, included Kings Cross, Holloway Road/Camden, Highbury, Hackney, and even Walthamstow out east, but we settled fairly quickly on Stoke Newington. As someone who works in the design industry, most of my colleagues live in the Dalston area and we find ourselves out there a lot for parties and nights out. I personally had spent a lot of time mooching about on Church Street visiting tea rooms and shops, so I felt quite at home in the village. During our marathon training, we both had used Clissold Park for making up mileage on our longer mid-week runs. The Overground trains had recently started service and while there isn't a stop in Stoke Newington proper, the walk to Dalston Kingsland and Dalston Junction stations were manageable, plus there are tons of bus routes in and out of the village. Basically the area felt like the next steps from our lives in Islington to the lives we were hoping to lead.

Once we decided that area was the focus, we started our search in earnest and began calling the dreaded estate agents who would decide our housing destiny. That sounds melodramatic, but is actually pretty bang-on. We'll talk about them tomorrow.

Kicking off house week: setting a budget

A long long time ago, I promised you guys a series on what it was like to buy property in the UK. But then life and that house happened, and here we are nearly 2 months into living in said house and all I've told you about is painting and DIY. As you can see above, I'm at it again with used bedside tables we picked up over the weekend that I'm painting grey.

But today's post is not about DIY; it's the first in a five part series I'm going to be writing this week about the steps we went through to buy our house in London. I'm going to keep it topline and factual, but obviously go into the details of how the experience felt in emotional terms. It was a wild ride, and I think I needed a few months of perspective to be able to write these posts objectively. 

So without further ado, let's chat about the real driver of a house purchase: money. When The Irishman and I set out at the beginning of the year to buy a house, it wasn't a spur of the moment thing. We had been talking for at least a year about finding a place to buy together so that we could create the home we wanted. Our previous place was a one bed flat that was probably better suited to a single person rather than a couple, and we dreamed of each having space as individuals to pursue hobbies and interests. Buying always felt just that little bit out of reach, though, with newspapers and financial journalists reporting that stricter lending criteria meant that first time buyers had to put down at least 30% deposits. It felt impossible, to be honest.

But somewhere around the first of the year, something snapped. I don't really remember what it was, maybe frustration at living in a cramped space, maybe frustration at not having equity and throwing away money in rent, maybe a sign that 10% mortgages were returning... at any rate, The Irishman and I sat down and reviewed our respective savings and realized that we were both sitting on more money than we thought. We each had approximately the same amount of individual savings, which amounted to a possible 10% deposit on a property. So we made an appointment with an independent mortgage broker recommended by a colleague to discuss our options.

If anyone in the UK is thinking about buying a property, my first piece of advice is to find yourself an independent mortgage broker. Ours was so helpful on so many levels in terms of helping us understand what we actually could afford. He recommended we stretch as far as possible in terms of buying the first property, as it makes us more financially independent moving forward with regards to recouping the initial outlay of stamp duty as well as just putting us that farther up on the property ladder. He also advised on calling in any possible loans from parents, bequests, gifts, etc, so that we could put as much in the down payment rather than paying off additional interest. He gave us handy spreadsheets that helped us understand things like actual monthly mortgage payments, interest vs capital repayments, and how the mortgage rates actually work. Most importantly, he gave us a sense of which banks would lend to us given that I'm a foreign national. More on that later.

So after one meeting with him we had an idea of what price range we could afford, and that made our property search come into crystal clear focus – all of a sudden, things became real in terms of price ranges, locations, numbers of rooms, and other features. At that point, we felt ready to actually start looking at properties and had the confidence that if we saw one we liked we could actually do something about maybe buying it. That in itself was the most amazing and exhilarating feeling – we were empowered as home buyers, not just property stalkers.

Tomorrow, I'll tell you all about how we approached our search and the ups and downs of navigating the world of estate agents and property open houses.

DIY Update

Hi bloggies! It's been a while, I know; we've been really busy trying to make our new house a home. When last I blogged, The Irishman and his brother had been ripping apart the place to paint the lionshare of it bright white. Now complete, we're really pleased at how much cleaner and brighter it looks. We're ready to start hanging art on the walls to really make it our own.You can see above the lovely light coming in from the back garden; it's pretty fabulous as a space, I must say.After the painting marathon, we spent a lot of time in the garden fighting back some of the wilds. We have lots of fascinating fruit plants invading our garden from neighboring patios; a fig tree and passionfruit and grape vines are all dropping their produce into our yard. Unfortunately, I think they're all ornamental so rather than try to keep it all, we hacked most of it away. Now the space is bigger, brighter and cleaner (sense a theme here?).Finally, the biggest excitement for a while happened last night when we bought a kitchen table. We were toying with going for a mid-century modern pieces like this vintage Ercol number below.

The Irishman wasn't really feeling the vibe, though, and I think for something like this to work, you have to build a world of mid-century around it otherwise it would feel out of place. Being so characteristic it would drive the whole aesthetic of the ground floor of the house, and since we weren't going to develop a completely new style overnight we decided to go with one of our original ideas: a vintage farmhouse table.Friends, do you know how expensive an old farmhouse table can be?Answer: as expensive as you want it to be! We found some new ones on Not on the High Street for into the £1000s; the prices for used/reclaimed wood tables aren't much better on Ebay or in antique shops, and those can sometimes have gaps in the planks and uneven surfaces that aren't exactly practical. We were considering just going for it and buying a new table until The Irishman found a listing for a table for sale in Stoke Newington on Gumtree for £225 plus a bench for £75. Last night we went around to look at it, bargained the poor man down to £275 and took the table home in the back of our Streetcar. You can see it, hosting my lovely autumn sunflowers, in the photo at the top.So we're on track, slowly but surely; this weekend we're headed to the New Forest to see some friends and planning on stopping into some vintage and antique shops along the way. Our next focus is bedside tables – I'll keep you posted on the search.

The DIY Begins

This was my bedroom last Sunday. That's my lovely new bed and amazing mattress, covered in plastic sheeting to protect it as we repainted the bedroom.

We've well and truly moved into our house, and have been in for nearly four weeks. But our quick turn-around move meant that we didn't actually have the luxury of doing things when we first got into the house that we originally wanted to do, like paint the entire house a base coat of white, get it professionally cleaned, etc. Only now are we really getting into the depths of making it our own.

While my friend was visiting last week, The Irishman had time to start prepping the bedroom for painting and we managed to get most of it done last Sunday. This week, he has a week of holiday before he starts a new job and his brother is over from Dublin to help him tackle the rest of the house. Though the entire place smells of paint fumes, already it looks brighter, cleaner, and more of a blank slate for us to make our own.

Hopefully by this weekend the guys will have most of the house done, save for the bathroom (already a lovely Farrow & Ball shade of blue), the loft (which was very recently painted and doesn't need any work), and the kitchen (which is such a disaster that we're toying with just leaving it until we're ready to rip it apart and replace it). 

After the initial white-wash, I plan on tackling the bedroom as the first room we decorate. I'm starting to build pinboards on Pinterest of colours, textures, textiles, and furniture, and we're excited to design  a restful and calm space we both enjoy.

Our House

So, we are in our new house.

There's really not much to say about it; I mean, there is so much that I can't write one summary blog post about it, but at the same time, it's so new that I'm still discovering lots of things about it each day. It's like getting a puppy, or having a child, I suppose, in that I need to learn about its quirks and habits and get to know its rhythms.

In the meantime, while I'm getting to know my house, here are some photos so you can see it too.

The front

The hallway, from the living room looking out the front door

The kitchen, looking out to the back patio

The lounge and back patio

The hallway on the upper floor, looking in the bathroom

The master bedroom (with a big closet!)

We are no where near being unpacked. I managed to clean the bathroom and half the kitchen, while The Irishman put together the guest bed in the spare room so we could sleep there while we wait for our new bed and mattress to arrive (delivery date TBD!). Because we moved so quickly, we had tons of plans in place with friends and tickets to events meaning that we have been out every night this week. I desperately just want to go home and clean some drawers and vacuum everything.

And once that is done, the DIY will start... we spent £150 at B&Q on Sunday on who knows what – paint, wall filler, sandpaper, dropcloths, rollers... we're painting the whole place white to begin with so it's fresh and clean for now, and then slowly decorating. My main priority though is to buy garden furniture so we can enjoy the patio for the last few weeks/months of warm weather. The Irishman ordered a BBQ that arrives Tuesday, so surely we need to sit outside to eat our burgers. And drink our rosé!

From exchange to completion to moving in 10 days

I almost titled this entry "shits gettin' real, y'all" but then thought better of it; though it describes how I feel about what's going on in my life, it doesn't really explain the journey we've been on over the last four weeks.

When last you heard about our house, I was giving you the update that we heard bad news regarding the property. At that stage, we had no idea whether we would even go through with the purchase or whether we would have to start back at square one with the house hunt. It was demoralizing, sad, and really really difficult to process. I mean, we had already picked out potential kitchen units for a refurb taking place two years in the future! We were emotionally invested.

So the only way to deal with our disappointment was to stop all home-buying processes in their tracks until the situation was resolved. No packing, no shopping, no plans, nothing. It was coming up to our week in Ireland, and still no word on what was going to happen so we mentally decided to give it until we returned – 31 July – and then start pressuring the seller to make a decision. 

But we finally got word the Friday before our trip that a plan was in place to enable the sale to go through, and we had to make some quick decisions. We had to decide whether we a) still wanted the house, and b) could stick to the originally agreed timetable for completing the sale by Tuesday the 7th. After much discussion, stress, and tears, we went to the lawyer during lunch the day we flew to Ireland (much stress!!!) and signed all of the necessary paperwork for exchange. Then on our return from Ireland, we went to see the house again and agreed the dates of the sale with the seller – exchange last week and completion this Friday the 10th.

So what does all this mean? It means that last week I emptied a few bank accounts, Monday my dad sent me a large sum of money in the form of a loan, yesterday I sent more money than I make in a year to a lawyer, Friday afternoon The Irishman and I will get keys to a house we own together, and Saturday we will move in! 

This process has been so complex and emotional, I can't even begin to explain it fully. I will write some posts soon about the house buying process in England and how we (sort of) survived it, but in the mean time it's all about the packing. It's a good thing, too, because we're running out of spaces for boxes for stuff. Phew! It will all be worth it in the end.

He was right

Let this be a lesson for you all in couples who think your partner is being crazy and superstitious.

He or she is probably right. Always trust your gut.

(That's him, above, telling me not to take his photograph in Barcelona – he hates when I take his photo on the sly).

Anyway, remember my last post when I told you I was sick of not talking about the house and that I was going to blog about it despite The Irishman's objections?

Well the next day we got our search results back. Yippeee! It only took 8 weeks despite Hackney Council promising them in 1 week. Except that we didn't expect our search results to include problems.

I don't want to go into too much detail here, but basically the house we're buying has a loft conversion. And that loft conversion, based on the type of house and area, needed to have planning permission before it was completed. And the seller didn't, to our knowledge or the Council's knowledge, have that permission.

This could be a major dealbreaker. Or it could be a simple hurdle to overcome. We simply don't know what will happen, so we are playing The Waiting Game again.

I have to tell you, this is a really depressing process. We've stopped everything in its tracks. We aren't buying a bed anymore (because if we don't buy this house, we won't need a king-sized bed - we won't have anywhere to put it!). We have a stack of packing boxes in the corner of the bedroom that we were going to start filling last weekend, but they've been forgotten about for the time being. All of the moving procedures we started to think about have been shelved – no talk of giving notice, or forwarding mail, or anything. My spreadsheets are all saved in Google Docs for one day, hopefully soon.

I feel like the weather is also compounding my disappointment; because of the house-buying process, we haven't had a vacation at all this year save for those we've been able to tack on to business trips or wedding visits. We can't plan one, either, because again, who knows – we might move in August, we might not! All of our money is being fed into a down payment fund, and we can't risk saying fuck it lets escape the rain and head to a sunny beach when we might have to buy paint and pay for a locksmith and homeowners insurance and and and and... My only consolation is that because of this weather, I'm not too angry about missing out on the evenings The Irishman and I could have spent in the back patio of The House this summer, drinking rosé. They would have been rained out anyway.

So we are headed to Ireland in two weeks to see The Irishman's family and I will cherish this trip as my summer vacation. My expectations for our 7 days away have been downgraded; I don't hope for a secret heatwave in southwest Ireland but I would love a sunny afternoon or two while I'm there. To be honest, I actually just want to get away from everything: from rainy London, from lawyers who don't call back, from real estate, from the economy, from my job, from my life at a standstill. Going to the green rolling hills and rocky Irish coast feels not quite relaxing but maybe soothing. I'll take soothing.

Also, I am suitably chastized enough to revert to my promise to The Irishman that I will not blog about The House until we exchange – which might be tomorrow, or might be never. So don't hold your breath for house-buying posts but please keep us in your thoughts as we navigate the murky waters of the London property market.

We are buying a house

I haven't posted in a while, so I figured I'd come back with a bang.

I've thrown off the Irish embargo on not talking about The House because, frankly, I'm bored of holding it in. We're 98.5% there so I'm going to give you and overview and once we are at 100% then I can fill you in on all of the juicy details.

So yes, we are buying a house. It is a house, not a flat nor a maisonette, and it is completely different from all of the houses we'd seen previously – in a good way. It is halfway between Stoke Newington and Dalston, so I don't have decide quite yet whether I'm an organic hippie or a too-cool-for-school hipster.

Our offer was accepted in early May and our mortgage has been approved, so all we're waiting for now is the land searches from Hackney Council. Their computer system has been down since Christmas, so all searches are being conducted by hand with lead times of up to 40 working days. We counted back and are at 35 days as of today since our lawyer initiated the search so literally we could be ready to exchange contracts any day now.

Once we exchange contracts, we can be confident that the house purchase will go through and then I can tell you much more detail about the house itself and our plans for it. We're hoping to move in sometime in early August so we've started mattress and bed shopping, which is proving nearly as hard as finding the house itself.

So yeah! Phew! It's a like a weight off my shoulders to tell all of you the news. I'll probably start blogging about the house purchase now, as well as the bed/mattress buying process I'm currently in the midst of, so if you have any specific questions or want me to write about something in particular, please do let me know in the comments.

A house update

Image courtesy of Flickr by jjay69

Hello from Doha! I've been meaning to update everyone on our house-buying process for a few days now but life sort of got in the way. Now I'm in the Middle East and there's no time like the present.


In a good way, my trip to Doha has put a much needed pause on our house search. We've let estate agents whip us up into a frenzy of viewings, offers, negotiation, and disappointment; what should be a joyous experience has become fraught with second thoughts and anxiety. To be honest, I think we're both relieved to get our heads out of the game for a bit.


We didn't end up getting the first house that I mentioned a few weeks ago, the full house in need of modernization. We put in an offer at the high end of what we could afford and it simply wasn't enough. Then a week after that, we saw a maisonette with a huge back garden – south-facing, so it got light throughout the day – and an interesting layout that avoided having the front door right next to the master bedroom. We put in an offer on that property last Monday, negotiated throughout the day and finally had it accepted – only to have someone else offer more a mere 5 minutes later. We actually think the estate agent called another interested party to say "hey, this house is going to go so if you want it, you should make an offer around £X." A few days later, more offers came in and they ended up going to sealed bids. Sealed bids is where you put together your offer, the final amount you want to put in on the property and any incentives you can offer (ie, no-chain, cash buyer, etc) and they all go, sealed, to the owner to decide who s/he wants to go with as a buyer. When they went to sealed bids for that maisonette, we decided not to participate because we knew it would go for much more than we were willing to pay.


So where does that leave us? Well, it leaves us in the exact same place we were a few weeks ago when I first told you all we were house-hunting: in our flat with a lot of hopes and dreams. But we now have a few more hard decisions to make. After seeing and almost getting a full house, we really want the full house over a half-a-house maisonette – yet we still want to be close-ish to central London, which means its questionable whether I can afford it. It really is a tradeoff between wishes and musts, and we're still uncertain about what we are willing to compromise on and not. So far, there hasn't been much on the market in our price range and everything that's decent that appears gets snapped up quite quickly; you feel like you see a property on Saturday and need to decide if you want it by Monday – that's really hard. But we keep hearing that the property market opens up in the spring, so there should be more for us to see as the year progresses.


Also, we're not really in a rush. Yes, we'd like a bigger home, to have a garden for when the weather warms up, and to just be THERE already, but there isn't any reason for us rushing to do it. I'm away until Thursday then we head to Dublin for a long weekend Thursday night, and next weekend we have house guests, so realistically we won't be able to fully re-engage with the house hunt until after St Patrick's Day. I think that's okay, and healthy – it gives us time to reassess our priorities and hopefully land on a few tactics that will help us move forward with more purpose and sanity. I am hoping our search will be less emotional, less highs and lows, and more targeted moving forward – and ideally end in success very soon. I'll keep you posted.

I declare this week a fail.

You know how they say "beware the Ides of March"? Someone should have said something about the ides of February this week. It seems as though everything I've touched this week has spoiled in some way, and staying positive has been rather trying.

I started the week by picking a massive fight with The Irishman about Life Priorities. Without going into specifics, I acted like a prat and he told me so. So I cried and didn't talk to him for 18 hours. Yes, prat.

The biggest fail of all was learning that our the house we put an offer on is being viewed seriously by a few other couples. One of those couples is taking a builder in with them to cost up doing a lot of renovations that could be done to the house before making an offer. It's a cruel blow, because, while this house has a lot of amazing potential, it is potential that The Irishman and I both dreamed about saving up for and doing slowly. So it feels pretty sad to think that some people with deep pockets might just be able to pay more for something we really want. It left me feeling powerless and depressed. But there is still hope, I suppose; we are still the only people who have actually made an offer on the house at this point.

But a close second was that same day, my anti-Valentines plans were completely dashed. At the end of last year, I spent a good hour scouring the National Theatre website for cheap tickets to see One Man Two Guvnors before James Corden left the cast. I finally found some for Wednesday February 15th, and The Irishman and I planned to use the tickets as an excuse for a night out – just not on Valentines. Until he looked at the tickets and realized they were for the 2:30pm matinee show, not the 7:30pm show. So I requested an emergency half day off from work and felt like a total fool.

Add to all that a pretty bad blunder at work and the fact that I haven't exercised at all since last Tuesday, and by yesterday I felt a little bit useless. But the upside is I've turned it all around in some way... I think. I made up with The Irishman, and feel like we are stronger than ever in our house search and life goals. I've reframed my expectations of the house, and made peace with the fact we may not get it. And our impromptu skive from work was actually really lovely; cocktails at The American Bar at The Savoy and dinner at Spuntino were perfectly timed instead of rushed before / after the show.

I wish I had a way to prevent weeks like this from getting the better of me, but sometimes, especially recently, I've felt like I drag myself across the Friday finish line just to sleep it off on the weekend. I do wonder whether being more consistent with running it would make a difference in my mood and how I handle stress (YES) but also how to make it easier to get out from under the dark clouds and onto the road to run. Running wouldn't have fixed someone else having more money to buy the house I want to buy, nor the fact that I booked tickets to a matinee show rather than an evening show, but it might have helped me laugh it off that little bit quicker.

PS This post is also dedicated to my lady friend who I ALSO had words with this week but whom is still  in my corner and who I'm lucky enough to have my back through all of this LIFE STUFF. 

The emotional ups and downs of expat home buying

Photo from Flickr courtesy of Limonada

So no progress I can report as of yet on the house situation. Offer is in and we're waiting.

Waiting in these types of situations opens the door to all kinds of thoughts: the good ones like "what type of bathtub should we install if we redo the bathroom" and bad ones like "oh my god I cannot believe I am contemplating spending this much money in one fell swoop."

It also gives a person time to self-reflect in quite a deep manner. Lately I have been rethinking my identity as an expat, what it means to buy property in another country and who I will be afterwards. The expat adventure is obviously alluring; just look at how many expat bloggers there are out there, people who dream of selling it all and moving clear across the world. It's a thrilling and illuminating, self-improving and horizon-expanding experience that I advocate to everyone. But at what point does it stop being an experience and begin to just be your life? Does buying property make you a local, or a resident, any more so than paying taxes? Does it make you less American? Or does it just make you a person who lives somewhere else? And what does that mean?

On a more personal level, buying a house changes priorities in a way that completely reframes the expat experience. At this stage, if our offer is accepted, there will be no more jetting off for city breaks, no more long weekends in Paris, no more extravagant meals in foreign lands, no more big holidays in the sun – at least for the first few years. Does that mean I'm going to miss out? Do I actually even want to buy a house? Or do I just want to travel more and live in a small flat to be able to afford that pleasure? And if I refocus my energies on building a home rather than exploring the world, will I realize that actually I don't want to live here anymore? What if I end up hating England?

And of course, there is then the big elephant in the room of me buying a property with The Irishman – I refuse to call him boyfriend, but he sure isn't my husband – and what that means for our relationship. We've already had a few corkers in terms of arguments, and, despite having a very equitable financial relationship, the idea of purchasing a property together is putting our relationship under a microscope. Everything he does I scrutinize, I'm sure he is evaluating everything I do, every penny we spend separately and together I analyze, and I'm feeling like at some point we'll either end up hating each other or self-implode. Or both! I blogged before about how buying a property together is the biggest commitment two people can make, and it's proving itself to be true on a daily basis. I've already demanded a declaration of trust so that neither of us can clean the other out if we split, but I'm also hoping that we can get through this period of doubt and tension so much stronger than we entered it. But if we do split up, and own a property, will I stay in England? Will it still be my home? Is my entire expat experience based on one man? Is that healthy? AM I HEALTHY? OH MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING?!

I guess what I'm trying to articulate is that while buying a property is emotional purchase regardless of where it takes place, as an expat it is even harder. It's surfacing all sorts of issues that I've either managed to bury or never knew I had, and in some ways they are harder to quantify than the figures on our mortgage spreadsheet. The only way to really deal with them is to just plow ahead, keep talking to The Irishman, and be honest with myself. Whatever will be will be and I will end up where I'm supposed to end up – whether it's London, New York, or somewhere inbetween.

Let's get practical, practical.

So, guys, I have some news: we found a house that we sort of love.

< cue squeeing >

During the viewing yesterday, I sent The Irishman a text that read "It's perfect". We left the property, walked down the street and just looked at each other knowing we'd seen exactly what we were looking for.

< cue squeeing >

But these are just the beginning, fragile stages of this love affair. It's very very new, and there are so many things to consider, steps to undertake, and at any moment the whole thing could collapse (not the house of course!). So I need to get practical with all of you readers.

I'm learning that buying a house is a really sensitive process. I am experiencing untold financial transparency with The Irishman, both of our families, a mortgage broker, and a mortgage company. So many possibilities need to be considered, so many conversations need to be had, so many pros and cons to be weighed, and we're being as open as possible with everyone we know. But at the end of the day it is a Big Decision that The Irishman and I will be making together – and alone.

So I need to put up some boundaries on this here blog, to protect our relationship and sanity at this very exciting yet stressful time. I promise to give you a few exposé-type posts when (if!) we ever do actually complete a purchase and buy our house. But until then, I'll continue to update you on our search, let you know how things are going, but I can't give you the gory details. I'm pretty open on this blog, both about my identity and life, but the Internet is wide and purchasing property is risky and I just can't take too many risks with this type of decision. I hope you'll understand and respect this, and continue to follow our progress on the blog and Twitter. I'll try to give you as much as I can, stay as positive as I can, and still make the posts interesting and exciting. Please don't hate me when you see a few "Goddammit-I-really-wanted-that-house-and-we-just-got-gazumped-and-I-can't-stand-this-city!!!!" posts.

Phew, that's over with. Sorry for the formality, peeps.

Now, about this house. In short: 3 beds, in need of DIY, lovely old woman living there and needs to downsize, nice garden, and close to Stoke Newington Church Street. In short, perfect. I am on pins and needles waiting for tomorrow 9am to call the estate agent to schedule another viewing, as we want to check on a few details before considering making an offer. We're not sure it's "The One" but it's as close as I think we'll come to it. So one more look, and then we have to – literally – put our money where our mouths are.

< cue terror! >

The initial foray into house hunting in London

This past weekend, The Irishman and I went for our first house viewing. !!!!

It came about like this:

Once we met with the mortgage broker who told us we could easily obtain (and afford) a mortgage loan in the area of £XXX,XXX (!!!!), we started scouring the internet for listings in our neighborhood and surrounding areas. We were pretty bummed, but not surprised, to learn that N1 is essentially out of our price bracket, especially the lovely Barnsbury Conservation area that I lust after so much (my walk to work is like a stroll through property porn, it really shouldn't be legal). So we started widening our search area and found that Stoke Newington, Islington's edgier, hippier, gayer, crunchier northern cousin, was actually much more affordable while still offering a lot of the amenities we desire – shops, cafes, restaurants, proximity to other cool neighborhoods, parks, and a good vibe. We found an intriguing listing after not much searching and decided, well, hell - no time like the present - and called to arrange a viewing.

Too bad that property was actually taken off the market, scheduled to possibly reappear in March, but the estate agents registered us and immediately started sending us emails of properties that suited our requirements. Those requirements are roughly:

- ideally a house, or a maisonette

- 2.5 or 3 bedrooms (The Irishman works from home most days now, so he needs an office in addition to us needing a spare room)

- 1.5 or 2 bathrooms

- outdoor space mandatory, garden preferred over terrace

- eat-in kitchen or open-plan kitchen/lounge

- ample storage (cupboards, cabinets, closets, etc)

- good light sources (windows)

And low and behold, an interesting property popped up in my inbox mid-way through last week and we got a viewing in the diary. We used it as an excuse to reacquaint ourselves with Stoke Newington overall, and decide whether it was a place we wanted to actually live.

The property itself was lovely, but not for us; we didn't like the layout of the interior and felt that it just wasn't workable for what we wanted. But the road was really pretty, the condition was excellent, and the garden was amazing. Also, the property was definitely owned by one of the former members of the one-hit wonders Cornershop – random! 

So we left the viewing feeling like what we want is definitely achievable in our price range – whee!!! – and in that neighborhood. 

Buoyed by what we saw, we strolled back in the direction of our current home, along Church Street; if you haven't ever been to Stokey, Church Street is the heart of the village full of cafés, shops, restaurants, and street life. It was buzzing on Saturday and full of people and dogs and with the sun shining it really convinced us that this would be a step up in terms of location rather than a compromise to leave Angel.

Next steps for us are to keep seeing properties: an estate agent told us that the national average is viewing 7 properties before putting in a offer. Simultaneously, we need to get back in touch with our mortgage broker to get what's called an AIP (agreement in principle). That basically means we have the confidence, and legal back up, to walk into an estate agent and make an offer on a house and know that we can get a mortgage to pay for it. It doesn't mean we're locked into using that bank or taking that mortgage, but it does give us a piece of paper that backs up our position.

And, I guess, we wait – with fingers crossed – for the right property to come available and the stars to align for us to see it, make an offer, and have it accepted. It sounds so straightforward, but I know it won't be; I know I will see a lot of houses before I find the "right" one and then it will be taken, or my offer won't be accepted, or it will all fall through... Sounds a bit like dating, no? Here's hoping that it doesn't take me as long to find the right house as it did for me to find the right (Irish) man!