Charles and I are house shopping. We actually haven't yet decided whether to rent or buy, but for now we're just looking to see what's available and when. We have such interesting time restrictions with the baby's arrival in May and Ger's return in August. (I'd rather not move with a two month-old baby, but someone has to stay at the house and feed the chickens until he gets back!)
We met with a real estate agent Wednesday and toured a house in Dwingeloo yesterday. It's small (2 bedrooms, 1.5 baths) but ended up being quite a nice place at an attractive price. It appears to be well-maintained with a recently-remodeled kitchen, good-sized living room, nice upstairs bathroom, enclosed back yard, straight stairs we could actually get our gigantic American mattress up (bonus!), and it's located in a nice neighborhood very close to the office.
The house has two drawbacks, though. The first is that the back garden is on the small side, and there's only about a 6x12' patch of grass for Maui to do his business in. But at least it has some grass (unlike some of the places I've seen online, including the house we're scheduled to tour Monday). And it's close to some large fields where I've seen lots of dog-walking going on in the mornings.
The second drawback we didn't even notice until our second or third look through the kitchen.
THERE'S NO OVEN.
Seriously. The current owners use a combination microwave/convection oven which seems pretty common here. I understand that the Dutch don't do much cooking in their ovens; they don't seem to have the meat roasting tradition we do in the States, preferring instead to cook their meat on the stove. But they still bake bread. They still sell frozen pizzas at the grocery store. I can understand that maybe the current owners don't cook much or never use an oven. But wouldn't you think that if you're going to do a nice remodel of a kitchen that you would at least think that not having an oven - even a small one - would be a hindrance to selling the house to someone else in the future?!? Crazy.
Wow, both houses are upser cute! Did you know that they sell stand-alone cookers now? Makes me wonder if they also have stand-alone ovens...might be worth checking out.
Enjoy the Great Belly Button Disappearance! -- Gretchen
Posted by: Gretchen | January 12, 2007 at 08:00 PM