House hunting begins

We’ve started looking for a house in Mexico City.  If you want to hear how it’s been going so far, read on!

I went to Mexico City this past Wednesday to meet with some fellow CAM people for breakfast (my alarm went off at… let’s see… before 4am I believe).  I went with Rod by foot, taxi, bus and bicycle taxi to the neighbourhoods of Ixtapaluca to check for houses.

What were we looking for?  Well, we would like a house in a nearby housing development.  We’d like something on the bigger side (more on that in a moment), and something that has a place for the kids to play.

Our list of "wants" is small, because these townhouses don’t vary much – we’re probably looking at 3 or 4 different layouts, and rather similar ones.  So there’s not a lot of options.

And when we say "bigger", we don’t mean very big (depends on what you compare it to, right?).  The house will almost certainly be smaller than what we have now.  But a typical house here is a tiny 2 bedroom, with a very small living area.  This isn’t the best for entertaining, and since our home is our "office", we would prefer a little more than typical living area – like an office, for example.

We eventually found two houses.  The first has 3 small bedrooms and an office.  It’s in a nice neighbourhood, with some playground space.  If we moved here we would also have access to a sports field, with bleachers, a track and a field.  However, it doesn’t have a yard – no place we could send the kids out by themselves (well, not Nathanael anyway).

There’s also some work to do on it – there’s no kitchen (hookups only, no cupboards, etc), no light fixtures, and some other things that would need to be done. (This house is actually new – however, these things aren’t unusual when you rent a house.  Often all you get is the walls and windows).

The other place we saw actually had only 2 bedrooms (no office), but we thought for a while we could maybe add a wall somewhere to make a third bedroom.  But the layout was . . . unusual.

Let’s just say some modifications had been made to the house.  I won’t go into all the details, but the upstairs bathrooms had been converted into a little room with a toilet, a room with two sinks (!), and a room with a small jacuzzi.  Only a jacuzzi, no floor space at all.  Give me a call sometime and I’ll explain how that all worked.

But anyway, it would take a lot of work to modify it so it worked for us.  The set-up is simply strange.

However, this place has a huge beautiful shared enclosed yard in the back, with playground equipment and a covered space.  Awesome.  Could we switch the houses, and put the first one where the yard is?  😉

Yesterday while the O’Briens watched Hannah and Nathanael (thanks!), Shari and I took public transportation back to take a look together (taxi, bus, walk, taxi, bus, walk, and then the reverse on the way home – several hours.  Our van needs some repairs before we drive pretty much anywhere besides the mechanic’s!).  We saw the first one, but the realtor wasn’t available to show us the second one.

However, this being in Rod and Mayra’s neighbourhood, they talked to someone that shared the yard, and they let us through the house into the yard so we could see it from the back.  Surprise – the back door was open!  So we took a look.  🙂

So, where are we now?  Well, first we have Nathanael’s birthday party on Tuesday.  After that, we’ll Lord willing head back to Mexico City to check for other options.  It would be great if we could make a decision over the next few days – stay tuned!