House-O-Meter

For those of you who have somehow magically escaped our ranting about finding a house, here's what we've been doing for the last three months: Finding a house. We haven't found one yet. Well, we may have, but then we thought that for house #6 on day 2, #25 about two weeks later, then we lost count but found several in suburbs all over town. Since Dunedin is, by area, the largest city in the southern hemisphere, that's quite a spread. It would take us 45 minutes to drive from a house we like at one end of town, to one at the other.

In any case, Kristi has done all the long hours of online research, made private appointments, and scheduled our weekend days to catch the open home times for the ones that could suit us. We've then together gone along, looking at each house with our different eyes, different interests, but, thankfully, quite similar tastes.

In retrospect, it's perhaps surprising that it took so long (probably 70-some houses, now) for us to come up with a way of more rigorously quantifying statements like, "it's not too bad," "we could change this (and this, and this)," and "I really like that." (Statements like, "I hate it," are really easy to work with: That's final and the sucky house in question is not in the running.)

We call it our house-o-meter.

The way it works: We have 16 categories: Neighborhood, Privacy, Open-Plan, Spacious, Location, Character, View, Price, Garden, Storage, Sun, Laundry, Warmth, Light, Access, and Futurability. We made up the last one, but it has to do with our finding that you can't buy a house with character without it requiring a certain amount of work; also, it represents the freedom that a house might provide us with putting our own stamp on it. For each category, Kristi assigns the house a score from 1 to 5, I do the same, and voila, we have a score out of 10. As soon as we started house-o-metering we realized that our scales actually had to accommodate terrible scores, so they're now between zero and 10.

Some of the front-line contenders were in the 110-120 range. We found out some interesting details from the scoring, with a few houses that seemed ok scoring quite low, and finding out what's really important for us.

And so, we've now put in an offer on a house that Kristi found earlier this week. It scored 122. We're about 50-50 excited and resigned; we have no idea whether the offer will be accepted. It doesn't help that our Daylight Saving ended today and our bodies are already out of whack with the day. We will obviously keep you posted on what happens next!