{"id":235,"date":"2006-06-09T19:22:54","date_gmt":"2006-06-09T18:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/2006\/06\/castlehunting\/"},"modified":"2007-01-25T14:48:59","modified_gmt":"2007-01-25T14:48:59","slug":"castlehunting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/2006\/06\/09\/castlehunting\/","title":{"rendered":"Castlehunting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Karen and I have chosen possibly the most inconvenient time imaginable to consider buying a house. But some things you can&#8217;t control, and you have to go with the flow.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of major factors have precipitated this new project. The first is the size of our current house, which is a rented property and consumes more than a third of our joint net income. Though it is adequate at present, I think that when the baby gets old enough to need his own bedroom, it just isn&#8217;t going to work for us anymore. It&#8217;s also on a relatively busy road by a railway station, with lots of boy racers, shouters, drunkards, urinaters and vandals all through the night. I think I&#8217;ve lived here for long enough.<\/p>\n<p>The second factor is a financial one. Whereas I was previously under the impression that making that first step onto the so-called &#8220;housing ladder&#8221; was out of my reach, I have recently reassessed and been pleasantly surprised by my findings. In the light of the deposit that Karen and I think we have at our disposal, research indicates that we stand a good chance of getting a mortgage that allows us to buy our dream house, with repayments that amount to less than our currently monthly expenditure on rent. We will be speaking to a financial adviser on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p>Last night we looked at a property in town which had good qualities, but not enough of them. Our initial gut response was a big &#8220;no&#8221; &#8211; we told the estate agent our specific reasons, for future reference. We then stopped off at a pub on our way home, where the introduction to my system of two pints of London Pride (and a lime &#038; soda for her) caused us to attempt to talk ourselves into liking the property in question. Naturally, our self-awareness left us in no doubt that this was a natural response, and nothing to act upon. Sleep on it? Damn right. This morning, we were back to &#8220;no&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>So the task remains to find the dream home. A lofty target, but nothing less will do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Karen and I have chosen possibly the most inconvenient time imaginable to consider buying a house. But some things you can&#8217;t control, and you have to go with the flow. A couple of major factors have precipitated this new project. The first is the size of our current house, which is a rented property and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meander","category-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pete.nu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}