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Looking for Your New Home

Whether moving to or in London, you'll expect to spend quite some time looking for a new home; something in a "nice" neighbourhood, perhaps close to a "good" school, and one that won't cost an arm and a leg! This could mean an older, established neighbourhood, but many of the houses, being older, might have quite a few flaws and need some improvement. You look until you find a house that has features that you really like, and either no work needed or work that you can handle. It sometimes takes a while, but you only need find one!

Know what you want
Write out what you are looking for in your next home, even briefly in note form. This form will help you describe the house that you want so that you can avoid being caught up in the "wouldn't it be nice if we had a hot tub/swimming pool/big backyard/fill in your own dream" thinking that leads to more cost, more maintenance, and more headaches than you bargained for, unless you've thought everything out thoroughly.

Know where you want it
Every neighbourhood has its own character, advantages and disadvantages. Old and established may mean fewer "mod cons" in the house; new and modern may mean no trees to speak of, and a fair distance from shopping centres or downtown. This form will help you describe the neighbourhood you want and will aid your agent in finding suitable locations for you.

The danger of comparing the best of the best with the rest
As you go house hunting, looking at several houses every over the weekend, there is a tendency to remember the best features of individual houses you've looked at, and to accumulate the best of these features into one "dream" house, against which you start to compare any house at which you are then looking. The dangerous thing about this, is that your comparison, the "dream" house, doesn't exist! At least, nowhere outside your memory and imagination. As a consequence, you might pass up perfectly good houses, in which you could live very happily, just because they fail to stand up to comparison with your "dream" house.

Keeping track
One solution is to take digital photographs of the houses that you view; be sure to ask the agent if the owner will mind you photographing the interiors. In this way you look at all the features of the house, rather than remembering just the good features. You can look at all the photos you've taken of one house and integrate the good features with any less desirable ones. You avoid remembering just the good features, building a perfect but imaginary house from all the wonderful features you've seen! If you're ever planning to build your own house it does help to remember the good points you've seen - you can design a house with all the features you've ever liked, and those photos will help you do that.

Keep really good notes about what you've seen and liked. Note the good and negative features about each house, unless it's completely forgettable. It is more work, but you'll be thankful when you see that special house that you like, the one that meets most or all your criteria, because you can make realistic comparisons with the other houses that you've seen.

Key answers
Every home buyer need to be able three questions about the house they intend to buy. These questions are:

• do I like the home?
• does it suit the needs of my family?
• can I realistically afford to buy it, and to maintain it?

If you like the home, and if it has that "special something" that sets it apart from all the others, you can accept, or work around, some minor items that are less than perfect. Or you might even consider renovations or other improvements to make the house even more suitable for your needs.

Possible improvements
Things such as a new roof or new furnace are higher cost items, but are not overly complex, and can be priced fairly accurately before making an offer on the house. You may want your offer price to reflect any work like this that may be necessary. Some improvements, such as new doors or windows, are easy to foresee and consider. The work involved isn't too complicated, and can easily be priced before you buy the house. Changing windows is most often done to improve ease of use or for cosmetic effect, but can increase the value of the house because of its increased "curb appeal".

Changing room layout can be much more complicated, and you might be restricted as to what you can economically change. Turning two rooms into one is easiest when the dividing wall to be removed isn't a supporting wall. (Find out which way the joists run. If the wall is parallel to the joists, usually it's a partition wall and changes are possible and easier; if the wall crosses the joists, it's usually a supporting wall, and changes will likely involve providing a beam to support the ceiling joists!)