House Hunting

You know House Hunters and House Hunters International are two of my favourite shows on HGTV. I think I enjoy them for their simplicity, but we also enjoy guessing which one are they going to pick. I also like seeing some really fancy houses.

Anyhow, the reason I bring this up, is that we will soon be House Hunters ourselves.

Following a strata meeting a few weeks ago (which Bill described quite well on his blog here) I came home declaring we were moving. We've been here for 9 years, and when we moved here we figured we'd be here for about 10 years. And actually, we were going to wait until next year. We wrote a list of improvements we were going to be making because we were going to stick around a while long. But following this meeting, I realized I don't have much patience for some of the people around here any more, and that perhaps I'm done with strata living.

Don't get me wrong - this has been a great place to live. We've made friends, it's been an awesome investment, our daycare is 7 doors away (speaking of which, they've listed too). But with frustration, and the HST coming in July 1, 2010, I think it's time to go.

And so begins the process of cleaning, decluttering, repairing, sprucing, etc... We actually don't have too much to do in the grand scheme of things because when we went on the market a year and a half ago we got rid of a lot of stuff, and fixed a bunch of stuff. My brother is going to install a tile backsplash in the kitchen for us, we're going to paint the master bedroom, we need to powerwash outside, but otherwise we're good.

And of course I'm searching online for houses, even though we're not ready to buy yet. I've found this one, which I really like from the looks of it, but of course it probably won't be for sale any more by the time we're ready to look. We have a realtor coming over on Tuesday evening to just meet with us and say hi (someone my brother has worked with, although we'll see if we actually use him or our regular realtor). We also have preapproval from the bank for a mortgage - so we're on our way.

We have 90 days to get this done. Let the games begin!