Given our current situation and our attempt to start a family in the next year, J and I are looking for a new home. We have changed our minds several times. Do we desire to live in the centre or in a village? Do we search for a house or a ground floor apartment? Should we live closer to the sea or out past the motorway? Do we wish to live with the Cypriots, expats or tourists, or a mixture? We keep swinging between the options. However, we have finally decided on the ideal for our future residence and we have just under a year to make it happen.
After six months of deliberations, we have decided on the village locale where we held our wedding reception and where we stayed for the honeymoon. It boasts enough in the way of entertainment, shops and amenities to keep us happy and content (we gave up on enticing friends to come and visit) and it is a far better environment in which to bring up children. In addition, it also holds some amazing memories for us.
There is a regular bus route into the city centre so I wouldn’t be too isolated (should I fail to pass my driving test). One of the primary bonus points, for our village choice, is the price of housing; we are better able to afford a house of ample size (with a yard or garden), within our budget, than we are in the centre of town or near the tourist areas.
We have also given a lot of thought to the ideals WE require in a home. When we began looking, within the first three months of our arrival here in Cyprus, we placed more importance on what would make people come to visit us than what we actually wanted, for us. Little things like knowing my mother would never visit without air-conditioning, or my sister/brother would never visit if there weren’t enough bars and clubs around, friends won’t visit without a pool… the list goes on.
As this is going to be our home and our life for 52 weeks of the year, the primary driving factor is what we want. Unless they intend to stay with us and pay the rent, no one else gets a say in where we choose to live.
I have a moratorium in place for house hunting, I’m not even allowed to look for somewhere until three months before we can move. I have learned my lesson the hard way; every time I look at houses (at a point when we are considering a move) I fall in love with a house that disappears at the last minute. Nothing else seems to live up to house that I fell in love with.
We are presently composing a list of requirements for this future domicile; a list of essential, ideal and nice-to-have components, which we can use to compare properties, and employ to make a decision. You can tell I have been watching too much Numbers (a TV show) when I start talking about weighting the components and creating viability graphs.