Moving to the country

The limitation of finding somewhere with a decent broadband connection has cut down our search options significantly. There have been a few lovely properties we’ve seen online which were disqualified as soon as we checked their proximity to the nearest telephone exchange.

So we have decided we need to widen our search parameters. We’re doing this in 2 ways: price and location. We’re now considering places further north and east than we have been, and we’ve upped our budget by £100 per month. This has led to us this short list of properties:

• a semi-detached in the heart of Braunston near Daventry
• a big thatched cottage in Milton Masor, just outside of Northampton
• an old cottage in the centre of Byfield (which is the centre of our original search area – the others are all quite far north or east of it)
• a detached house at the edge of the village of North Crawley, North east of Milton Keynes

We were trying to line up a day of viewings for Monday but one estate agent can’t show that day and another doesn’t have the keys for the property. We went ahead and booked in just the two appointments, but then we had second thoughts.

The estate agent for the detached property in North Crawley did a good sales pitch on us, telling us that it is going to go really fast (as are most places, which is why we are rushing to get these viewings booked) and that she already has some people booked to come and have a 2nd look on Saturday.

These are the photos of it online.

Looking on Google maps and streetview we’ve also learnt that the house backs onto a field and looks out onto allotments on the other side of the road (and then more fields). There are two pubs in the village, and a little shop. The house isn’t as big as you might imagine from this photo because it is just one room deep, but it has the right number of rooms and they look a good size. It also looks like it has some out buildings (potential studio for North?). It checks so many boxes that we’ve decided to get the train up there tomorrow.

My parents are away until Sunday, which limits our viewing capabilities, but the village is only 7 miles away from a train station so we can train+cycle there. I looked up the route on the Sustrans website and have found there is an off road cycle path which takes us half the way, the rest will be mostly along country roads. I’m so glad I did this because if I’d only gone by Google maps we’d be cycling 4 miles along a very long and boring mostly residential street.

After checking the property websites regularly for a couple of weeks we decided it was about time we went and had a look at some properties, even if they don’t quite meet our criteria, it will help get us get a feel for what is out there and what you can get for your money.

There were are few places we were interested in viewing, but only one which we could get an appointment to see on the day we had free. So we went anyway and made a day trip out of it. We had a look around a pretty Victorian house in a very small village called Lower Shuckburgh, where were shown round by Sir Robert Shuckburgh himself! Turns out he owns most the houses in the village. Now that is what I call a landlord.

The property has a nice big kitchen without those (usually ugly) built-in kitchen units and wooden floors throughout. It is semi-detached and surrounded by a garden on all 3 sides which backs onto fields behind. But it was obviously going to be cold and damp and it mainly relied on storage heaters heating. Working from home, we especially don’t want to be battling to keep warm. And then we found out that they couldn’t get a reliable broadband connection and were using a satellite broadband instead (*this was before we’d thought to check the postcode on the broadband checker first). So we carried on looking.

We drove through a few more villages in the area that we hadn’t explored in our recces earlier this year. And we drove past a property which we’d seen online and wanted to look around, but which hadn’t been available to view that weekend. It was in a hamlet called Arlescote and the location couldn’t have been better. The potential snag was that it was being offered furnished. (We found out when we called this week that the landlord is rather eccentric and that the furnishing extended to the ceramic nic-nacs left on window sills, books left filling the shelves and he even leaves his dressing gown hanging in the bathroom ‘incase you want to use it’. So we’ve written that one off too.)

Realising we were going to need to make a compromise somewhere, we stopped and had a look around a town called Southam, to see how it might feel to live in a small town instead of a village. There was a house for rent on the main road which was currently undergoing renos so we peered in the window. It looked like a really nice house, but we agreed that living on the main road would be a bit too busy for us, but that if we could find somewhere nice on the outskirts we’d consider it.

The search continues.

We started looking for places at the beginning of September. We aren’t exactly ready to move yet but we want to get a feel for what’s out there, and it turns out that there are some places that come on to the market 2 months ahead of the availability date anyway.

We soon realised that there is a major flaw in our ‘let’s move to the middle of nowhere‘ plan. Broadband. It turns out even villages only a few kilometres from the nearest telephone exchange “can’t get 2mbps ADSL, might get 1mbps”. Given that we work from home designing, er, websites, we kind of need to make sure we have a decent internet connection.

So my house hunting procedure has incorporated a new step. Once I’ve found a house matching some preliminary requirements (price, location, no. of bedrooms, garden) I go straight to Sam Knows broadband checker and put in the postcode of the house (or a local pub/business in the same village if it isn’t supplied). Then I weep.

I annotate my ‘saved properties’ on the Prime Location Rightmove Find-a-property Globrix websites with the details of the broadband availability, or lack thereof. Just in case I forget why I’ve written off a property later.

Taking a look at the Locality view of the broadband checker I’m starting to learn which villages have Telephone Exchanges and which villages are too far from these villages for us to consider. At least this saves me getting excited about properties in the wrong location.

Given this significant limitation on our search criteria we’ve started to cast our net a little wider, both in considering locations further afield than we had originally intended and in considering houses in the centre of villages too (instead of limiting it to those on the outskirts as we had been before).

We spent this summer galavanting around Chicago, Vancouver and The Okanagan Lake. We didn’t stop thinking about our plan though. In fact our travels confirmed that we still really want to move to the country.

We stayed with North’s parents in the surburb of Ladner, which is part of the Municipality of Delta, located south of Vancouver. Their house is situated within a Wildlife Management Area, and their back garden borders on a slough. I found it incredibly peaceful being there surrounded by (the perhaps not so) wildlife.

There was a robin was hopping around the freshly turned over garden every day, taking worms back to his babies. There were also baby racoons playing in the willow tree, a heron fishing in the slough, ducks dabbling in the water and then there was the sound of the bullfrogs quacking away by night.

Okay, so I could leave the sound of those frogs out of my plan for rural living, but the rest very much confirmed that I do want to live in the countryside (though I doubt we’d be lucky enough to find such a nature rich location as this).

We also stayed in the east end of Vancouver with North’s sister. This was the only time when my conviction teetered slightly. The area around The Drive is a really cool neighbourhood: I wish Donald’s was my local grocery store, and the Italian deli Bosa my corner shop. So I had access to excellent grocery shops in Hackney. But I didn’t have a view of the mountains when I went for a walk in the park or at the end of every street (and even from my window). Nor could I get in the car and drive for an hour and a half to go for a hike up a mountain beside a beautiful river and waterfall.

The only problem with Vancouver, and it is the same with London, is that housing is super expensive. People like us will struggle to afford a house with a garden in a nice or central neighbourhood.

Next stop was Duncan and Joey’s house in the Albany Park neighbourhood of Chicago. Chicago is a huge sprawling city, full of striking architecture, but also a fair bit of nature. The North Shore Cycle Trail started just a few blocks from where we were staying. I cycled about 10 miles of it up to the Baha’i Temple and had my lunch on the beach follow by a quick dip in the lake.

Most of the streets in Chicago are lined with trees, usually with wide grass verges between the pavement and the road. We regularly saw bunnies jumping around these verges.  I loved the fact that at the east end of every road is the lake, from which point you could always walk along the Lakeshore trail to a variety of lovely beaches.  And the food was amazing. But. It is still a big, concrete, noisy, highly populated city.

Finally, we had a fantastic holiday on a boat on Okanagan Lake, interior B.C.

We stayed in this dinky little house boat, seen here from the hillside beside a boaters  beach.

The hot summer temperatures, beautiful landscape, plethora of wineries and goat farm (with 40 different types of cheese!) were all very enticing, but ultimately, what with the 5 hour drive from Vancouver on top of a 9 hour flight to LHR, I think it would be a little too far to travel for client meetings in London.

 

While we were away this summer my 90 year old Grandma realised she didn’t want to drive her car any more and generously offered it to us.

We gratefully accepted!

It is a blue Vauxhall Corsa Club registered in 2000 with only 40,000 miles on the clock.

It looks a lot like this.

Now I have to learn to drive. North will need to take a test too, due to some ridiculous rules surrounding the transfer of a Canadian license to a UK license. We’re hoping it won’t take too long for North to learn the rules of the road and how to drive on the wrong side of it, as we don’t feel it would be a good idea to move to the country without a licensed driver in house. (Though I confess I’ve started entertaining the idea of just going and finishing up lessons/tests while we are there. I’m getting impatient. And we have bicycles and internet shopping!)