a chara...: Home Sweet Home! Where is that anyway?!

Some of you have visited no. 304 in the Bakery, the rest of you have experienced it through 'A Chara'. For the last 3 years it has been the 700 sq ft of Belfast that we have called home. Erin transformed it from bachelor pad to the Madden homestead it is now within a few weeks of her arrival on this island, mostly through the generosity of some of your wedding gifts! It has been a great spot for us to break-in our lives together. There have been some great reasons to love this place: 1) That view, 2) It's so warm 3) It's new, 4) So cheap to run, 5) It has a gym, 6) The location. There are some intangibles too like the fact that we never get rained on bringing our shopping in from the car, or the fact that our car never frosts up, or the Grocery Store in the building!

But, it's not really ours.

We would both admit now that as of May this year we are entering a different phase of life. Yes, a baby will do that to you. But for other reasons too. And all of a sudden 700 sq ft doesn't feel that big any more. In the last few months Erin and I have been feeling like this was a season of change for us and as Christmas approaches we are embracing it.

Almost 6 months ago we welcomed the Ludwicks on tour and the first stop on their Irish adventure was to attend a house viewing with us! 291 Holywood Road. A real project but a gem waiting to be polished for someone with the time and the money. We thought it was us. So we viewed, and prayed, and viewed again. The Ludwicks saw it, my parents saw it (they even drilled the neighbours for information), we thought it was going to be ours. We bid - rejected, then someone else bid, and bid again - both rejected. Then nothing happened for 3 months as we waited to see which bidder would flinch next. It was quite exciting. It's the house with the yellow for sale sign in the foreground of the photo below. All the the while though....

Lurking in the background, 4 doors up the Holywood Road, is a light blue house
that came on the market during our bidding war. We didn't even notice it!
(If you strain you can see the blue for sale sign)

Finally the realtor called and said it will be sold to the other bidders that week unless others bids are received. So we bit the bullet and bid again. Then they bid, we bid, they bid. Then out of nowhere a 3rd bidder comes on the scene and outbids us both. At this stage, knowing that the house was already stretching our budget (not including the roughly $70,000 of work that needed done!) we decided to throw in the towel. We were quite gutted but remained pragmatic about the situation. We were sure this was meant to be the house for us. Something about the Holywood Road appealed to us, even though it is the other side of the city to our Ormeau Road which we love so dear.

So the house hunt began again. We organised 9 house viewings for one Friday afternoon, dragged my dad, the house expert, up from Kildare to join us, brought our pen and paper and blitzed it. The viewings were scattered over all parts of Belfast starting near the Ormeau and working their way East. The last viewing that day was a 1,200 sq ft 3 bed semi-detached house on Holwood Road:

Long story short, this happened 2 weeks ago;

Sale Agreed

Now we are in escrow as I believe the yanks say. This process could take anything from 4-8 weeks. And nothing is guaranteed so don't go congratulating us yet. It is just one of a number of hurdles that need to be negotiated on our route to home ownership. By the way, the address will actually be 2 Clonaver Park, in case you are interested.

Now I know some of you will start to say 'wait! you promised us her back after some time. this isn't what we signed up for. we want our Erin back!' I hear you. I understand your concerns. But let me assure you, this doesn't change our plans. We're coming back. This decision was taken in light of; 1) the fact that we believe our Irish adventure has another 2-3 years to run and it does feel like we are meant to be here for now, 2) compared to Santa Barbara, Northern Ireland is quite an affordable place to live and mortgage repayments are generally lower than rent. After paying off $40,000 of my landlord's mortgage I figure I'd rather be paying off our own and 3) thanks to my father's mastery of negotiation we appear to have bagged ourselves a bargain.

Now we need to shop for some beds because when you visitors come, we need to have somewhere to put you.

In the meantime, we've been doing the usual (except more festively);