Two houses, serendipitously seen

We have an appointment this evening to look at a house I showed you in an earlier post (the little one. The giant ivy-covered fabulous one is already "reserved," whatever that means). They don't put the addresses on their site, but when I called she said it was on (um, let's call it) Churchfield St, and we should just meet at the head of that street, okay? Okay.

Well, the street name and a picture of the house's front is enough for me to find it, so we went up last night after dinner to take a look. And while we were sniffing around, asking eachother if this was the right house, a man working in a nearby yard asked us (in English) "You want to buy that house?" I asked if it was the one that's for sale, and he said "Yes. I also have a house for sale, would you like to see?" And, like, whoa, kismet? Because he doesn't even live there, he was just there doing basic maintenance stuff when we happened along.

So we got to go in and look at his house. Not listed with a realtor, which is good, as the buyer pays the commission here. And the guy seemed nice. And the house has this magical property of being bigger inside than outside. And I love the kitchen, and it has one of those wood-burning oven-thingies for warmth - well, additional warmth plus atmosphere, there's also a regular gas-heating system - and a winter-garden...hang on, that's not English... um, a glassed-in patio, so the plants can be happy in winter? It also has The Magic Word: built-in bookshelves. Ooooooo. And berries in the yard. The yard is tiny, but I can't decide if that's a good thing or a bad thing. The kids love having a place to run around, but DrBob hates all the yardwork he has to do. The Sniglet loved the house to bits. Ignatz just wants to stay where we are right now. Forever.

Anyway. Cmhl was right, the house-hunt is a really exciting time, and I'm not sure I want it to be over yet. But I really, really like this house...

Oh right, and we also looked at another one. I think I mentioned that all the houses on this hill were built at the same time (1996 or so), and they're all row houses with 3 units per building. So this is another house just like ours, only up the road a bit, in a quieter and less trafficky location. We went up there to sniff around, and the next-door neighbors just happened to be in their front yard, and they just happen to have a key, so they showed us around. I don't think we'll want to buy it, but what's interesting about that house is that it's quite similar to ours - in size, floorplan, materials, location, age, etc - and they want €259,000 for it, which gives us some idea as to what the owner of our house might ask, should he be willing to sell it to us. So now we know that not only can we afford this house, we would actually have money leftover to change the things we hate about it. Hmmm...

And I already used This Must Be the Place as a recent song du jour of the day, hm. So for today, how about XTC's Mayor of Simpleton.