House Hunters International -- House 1

House hunting in the UK is a different beast than house hunting in the US was! The nice thing is that we will be renting for the next 3 years, rather than purchasing, so that takes the stress away from considering resale value, etc. We can find something that works for us. Some of our priorities for house hunting are:
- Space for guests, so a minimum of 3 bedrooms (4 is ideal). Friends & family welcome once we find a place and are settled!
- A decent kitchen, with a dishwasher (not a standard appliance in the UK or Europe)
- Space for a washer & tumble dryer (again, not standard in the UK... our rental place has a combo washer/dryer, which is unheard of in the states. It takes about 3 hours to run a small load of wash. We can rent washers, dryers, and a few other appliances from the air force base as needed for the duration of our stay.)
- A large enough village/town to have areas to take walks with Charlotte, and hopefully that has local playgroups and/or other activities to get me out of the house! Staying at home with her full-time is new to me, and I want to be sure I don't slowly lose my mind :)
- Bathrooms to include a tub for bathing Charlotte, and a shower for the adults (some places have showers only)
- Not too large of a yard (a "garden" as it is called here) -- we aren't keen on wanting to spend lots of time maintaining the outdoors on weekends, when hopefully we will be able to explore/travel.

Other than that, we were pretty flexible. I did a lot of searching on rightmove.co.uk and found several places that appeared to meet our needs, 4 of which were being "let" (leased) by the same company. So we phoned them up and set up appointments for Friday. On Thursday, they called to let us know that one of the 4 properties had already been leased, so we were down to 3 appointments.

We met the letting agent (realtor) Lyn at the first house, which was in the village of Wistow where our good friends Jerome & Erin live. In the style of HGTV's House Hunters International, I present to you the first home. After the 3rd post, feel free to guess which one we ended up deciding on!! (And I'll tell you in my next blog post.)

Front of the house; 2 door detached garage on the left. The garages here are really too small to park more than a compact car in; it seems most people use them more for storage.

To the right as you walk in, a separate "study." Built-in desk & shelves.

The "cloak room" (half bath) on the first floor.

The kitchen. Full-size dishwasher in the right lower cabinet.

Electric stovetop & oven.

Mudroom, with space for washer & tumble dryer. Space for a large fridge where the ladder is located.

Doors/windows onto the backyard from the living room.

Looking down toward the ground floor (I took picture from the 2nd floor; there are no basements in any of the homes we have looked into).

The full "family" bath upstairs; bath & shower stall. The black object above the toilet is actually the pull cord for the lights, I didn't realize it made the picture.

Very nice closets in each of the bedrooms, which is rare -- many homes do not have any closets ("wardrobes") in the bedrooms. This one had built in drawers and trouser racks, shoe racks, etc.

One of the bedrooms; 3 were approx this size, with the 4th being quite small but would be functional as a small nursery, office, or storage area.