Impatient

Remember this post? I said I might like this house when we went to Wales and the problem is, we have fallen a little bit in love with it but are not in a position to buy yet. I am champing at the bit with impatience - we might have seized it off the market by now if only we had sold both our properties!

It wasn't the hugest house for the money, nor blessed with the enormous garden that I wanted to burden my inexperienced gardening skills with, but its location was breathtaking: an attention-seeking, double-fronted beauty perched amongst a small clump of houses on the slope of one of the Clwydian Hills. You couldn't wish for more if you wanted peace and fresh air - with a public footpath leading up the hill behind and Offa's Dyke Path just down the lane, it was enough to make me weep. And it wasn't too perfect - there was scope for converting the garage into a proper studio, opening up the kitchen and converting the loft.

We visited the house and its charming artist owners twice in five days. They are avid collectors of amazing vintage things, the volume of which slightly swamps the poor house - it is much bigger than it appears at first glance.


It also appeared, when I was nosing in the loft space with a torch, that they have a George Nelson Bubble lampshade kicking around in the dust up there. I nearly died.


The rest of the houses we saw paled into insignificance against it - too pokey, too messed-with, too dilapidated, too suburban... The only thing that I took from these house viewings was the realization that the Welsh are obsessed with badgers - one lady liked to feed them in her back yard and watch them at night, another moaned about the state of her lawn in their wake. They were funny. Oh, and there are prolific amounts of wild garlic on everyone's doorstep - foodie bliss! All we have here in Essex is bindweed and ground elder...

Ah well. I am trying not to choose a house with my heart before my head, if that makes sense. I am not in the business of house buying just to end up disappointed - it's no fun that way, so we continue to wait and watch.