STILL LOOKING

We're still looking for a house to buy in Wellington. A couple of promising prospects turned out to be duds in that they, both being monolithic cladding townhouses, had histories of leaking and having to be reclad at the cost of hundreds of thousands. "All good" you might think - "they've been repaired" - but the research I've done suggests that cladding repairs can only be guaranteed for twenty years and the ones that we looked at were repaired about 2008. We moved on.

A third townhouse we looked at, in Kelburn, has an impeccable record and has cedar cladding with no history of leaking (built in the early 2000s).

This is a very nice house and ticks every box that The Old Girl likes except for an easy walk to her work in downtown Wellington. For this reason we decided to, not rule it out totally, but to put it on the back burner to revisit later. I must admit that I wasn't too concerned at this as I consider the house to be 'an old lady's house' - too tidy and fussy to appeal to blokes. It also has no panoramic views being in a gully (The Glen).

We then looked at other prospects in Mount Victoria, Te Aro, Mount Cook and even, yesterday, in Khandallah. In general we have now eliminated suburbs like Oriental Bay (too expensive), Mount Cook, The Terrace, Brooklyn, Mount Victoria South, Hataitai, Newtown, Berhampore (regardless of the fact that Shelley's uncle and aunt almost bought a house there), Island Bay, Karori, Northland, Miramar, Kilbirnie, Seatoun and, for obvious reasons, Lower Hutt*.

I admit to being 'over it' and basically anything will do. An exascerbating factor is that, at this time of year not a lot of new properties get listed. I really don't think we can stand leaving our search until say, February given that I don't like living in this inner city apartment we are renting.

When discussing the options this morning The Old Girl removed her  major objection to the Kelburn townhouse saying that as she only intends working for another year, the walking to work difficulty would not last long. We've decided to have another look at the property with a view to whether we can live without a seaview. I looked carefully through the property information toady - builder report, LIM, body corporate details etc. and we thought we will make an offer, discounted by lack of a seaview after we have revisited.

Old lady's house here I come.

* To be honest though I floated the idea past The Old Girl today of living in Eastbourne and the bays and 'watchlisted' a property In York Bay that we could afford.