Searching For A House

An ‘extra’ child, a rental house falling down around our ears and several years of hard saving has finally put us in the position of looking for a house of our own. We’ve been keeping track of the market in areas we want, even put an offer in on a place where we were pipped at the post by $4K. After we lost out on that one, and knowing what was available, we decided we would be better off building.

Now, I remember when I was 10 years old and mum and dad decided we needed a new, bigger house (and that was only with two kids!). There seemed to be endless days of being bundled in to cars, driving for hours on end looking at houses and empty blocks of land. It was the most boring thing imaginable to a young boy and seemed to last forever. Eventually they settled on an AV Jennings design and ended up buying the display home (the Crestwood Deluxe from memory).

Phee, Bert, Henry and Kennedy have no idea how lucky they have it. We’ve been looking for months and today is the first day they’ve had to come with us, and that was for a quick forty minute trip. Google has saved them the horrors of my childhood. We’ve used Google to find houses, construction companies and land. We’ve used Google Notebooks to keep track of options and questions we need to ask. We’ve used Google Docs for spreadsheets to track auction results. We’ve used Gmail (Google email) for communicating with agents and each other. We’ve used Google Calendar to plan the couple of visits we’re making to display homes and we’ve used Google Maps & Google Earth to research land options, surrounding areas and planned amenities such as schools and shops. When we finally make a decision and then move in it truly will be the house that Google built.