Searching for home

We're still house-hunting.

We've found something we like, and may make an offer on it. Maybe. Or maybe not. I'll figure it out over the coming weeks.

But all this house-hunting is wearing us down.

If you've been following this blog for any time, you'll know we've been house-hunting for over a year now. And it's been a long year.

It's been over a year since we sold our house in Melbourne, Australia, and upped oars for Dunedin, New Zealand. In some ways, I miss our old little patch of earth, mainly because it was ours.

I miss being able to nails things into walls, and plant things in our own garden, and invest time and effort in a place that meant something to us. We've been renting now for nearly a year and a half, and renting drains me emotionally. I've put down roots in this new town of ours, and am starting to make friends and even feel like I might belong here. But a home of our own is still lacking.

In the time that we've been looking, more workmates of my husbands have come to the town and found homes of their own. We seem extraordinarily fussy, with a long list of "must haves" and "should haves" and "would like to haves", plus the fact that we don't want a massive debt on our shoulders that will burden us for the next few decades. So we want all our needs met, but within a fairly tight budget.

And in the meanwhile, while we continue to search for our own property, our children grow up and change. Our son will be in school next year, and our daughter has transformed from a baby who couldn't walk into a little girl sleeping in a big bed of her very own! Time flies by, and still we're hunting for home.

I don't know whether we'll make an offer on the place we quite like. And even if we do, another offer might be better, because we're certainly not going to offer a high amount in the current real estate climate - that would be foolish.

The logical part of me tells me there is no harm in waiting and being cautious - there will always be another house, prices are dropping and continue to do so, and we're not going to be priced out of the market any time soon.

The opposite is likely the case - that by waiting, we stand to benefit. Prices have already dropped nearly 10% since we came to Dunedin. That's years off a typical mortgage. Waiting is wise.

It's just that I want to plant trees and dig earth and paint and settle into my own place. My own place. I want my transition years to be over. I want to be still. I want to know my own place, and to add my own sense of beauty to the earth, and to know peace.