It helped that we have done this before. We knew it would be fast, we knew we needed to be prepared, and we knew we would have to make snap judgements. It helped that Willy had been in town for a few months, and had narrowed down the neighbourhoods that would suite our needs, and that the rental market is really well captured on the Zillow app, two luxuries we didn’t have when we moved to India.

Still, we had twelve houses to see, in just one day. In a perfect world, that meant we’d travel from house to house in ten minutes or less, and have 20 minutes to look through a house and decide if it was the one for us. It didn’t work that way, and as the day went on, we had less and time at each house. Sometimes it was traffic that did us in, and either we were late, or the hosting agent was late, and once the agent brought the keys to the house that was three doors down the street (we toured it to, but it wasn’t for us). A couple of times we just got distracted by the house we were looking at. One was a well panelled, wall to wall shagged hippy paradise from the 60s:

Another was an incredible mansion…

With a view that was stunning…

Eventually we landed at one of houses that I had found in my research. It appeared to hit all of the wishes on our list, but I’d forgotten which one it was from the outside. I walked inside and said, “Oh. I was waiting for this one.” We walked around a bit and I knew. I didn’t take any notes while we were there, I simply wrote “this one” on the info page for our new home!

This one.