HOUSE HUNTER:Until the house of our dreams comes within our means, we've decided to kill the commute by renting an apartment in the capital, writes DON MORGAN
THE ESTATE agent from a house I saw last week kept ringing to follow up on my viewing. It was way out of my price range anyway, and I never bothered to return the call, he was too needy.
Three years ago I wouldn’t have been afforded a second’s thought. When I went to view the house, I was covered in sweat, my hands had oil all over them and my pants had come out second best in a tug of war with my bike chain. I cycled, but not from Carlow.
We’ve looked for a house all of seven, eight months, who really knows, and our idea was that the two of us would find a place by September.
We nearly got one place, and ran away. Actually getting a house eluded us, much to our inconvenience, but, hey, what we got was a whole lot better.
It also leads me to ask a question put to me by a friend who bought at the height of the boom: why do people buy certain places and how does their choice affect them?
My wife, Maureen, signed up to buy the house in Carlow before we got together, and by the time we were an item, she was busy sashaying onto a building site to do battle with a developer who frankly didn’t seem to think much of women, or anyone else that wasn’t him.
At the time, we were living together in a bag under a desk in my mother’s house. Not exactly a great property, the underside of an office, but at the height of the boom it didn’t look like much else was going to work out financially. We subsequently lived in two places together – a flat in Stepaside I’m convinced was poisoning us, and Carlow.
We noticed one day, due to the most idiotic lack of co-ordination of road works, that it took us as long to get to work from our flat in Stepaside, a place where we could see our place of work from the roof garden, as from another county!
We moved to Carlow and saved ourselves €1,100 a month, and thought we might find work below and integrate into the local community. We persuaded ourselves this was possible. In reality, the only thing we got was tired.
We both suffered from extreme fatigue, Maureen got sick during every holiday we had, and I was like John Nash in A Beautiful Mindand had escaped reality altogether – I hid in my study spending time trying to find the German world service on my AM radio.
The only neighbours we knew to talk to, stubbornly kept themselves to themselves. On the other side of our house, there were about 150 Poles living in the same room, who spoke little of anything, other than the one guy who admonished me for how I negotiated the roundabout at the entrance to our estate.
Nobody was particularly friendly, and we, it has to be said, were miserable and isolated. Were it not for my in-laws visiting after Mass, and the internet, we’d have lost it completely.
Work was tough and during the snows last March we were cut off, because Kildare County Council doesn’t seem to believe in gritting roads before 9am, despite most of the traffic starting to build for the previous three hours, with the bleary-eyed trek to Dublin.
We found neither work nor a social outlet there at all. Our best friends in our time in Carlow were detectives Stabler and Benson from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
Many people bought houses they didn’t need, when everyone was drunk on a cocktail of avarice and cheap credit. The tragic part is, that you have a choice in the matter. We’re now renting, which will do us fine for the moment, while we continue our search.
People do it in other cities around Europe with no post-colonial land inferiority issues. The place is bright, modern, clean, near the Luas and a 20-minute cycle to work.
We can ask ourselves what we really want and make the right choice. Right now this is it. Apartment living in the capital, and it’s not too shabby at all.
