You’ll want to move home for many reasons. It’s one of the biggest, and most stressful decisions you’ll ever make, so it’s important that you get it right before jumping in. There are many reasons to buy a house. You want something bigger, or something smaller, something with fewer stairs, or buying a new home now you can finally afford to move out of rental properties and start paying money into a bricks and mortar investment into your own future.
Location When Buying A New Home
As the old adage goes: the three most important factors to look at are location, location, location. And that hasn’t become any less true as the years have passed. You might find a beautiful property which has everything you want, but it’s located under an airport’s flight path. Or downwind from a waste processing plant. If you’re a heavy sleeper, hard of hearing or have a terrible sense of smell then these may not be deal breakers, but for young families and people with particularly sensitive noses, they’d be absolute no-no’s! So what are the pros and cons of location?
Hospital
School
Shops
Work
Family
Friends
Roads
Rail links
Airports
Industrial centres
New housing developments and building work
While it looks like a list of best to worst, each of the items has both a pro’ and a con’. Hospitals with A& E departments can be noisy, but a lifesaver if you or a family member has a condition which makes proximity to medical services important. If you have kids a good school nearby is an absolute boon, but they, like shops, also create an incredible amount of traffic, which brings with it noise and pollution. Railways nearby make commuting easy, but again, the sound of trains late at night can disturb your sleep if you’re an early riser.
There’s never a perfect location, so see what’s nearby to any property you might be interested in and weigh up the benefits with the drawbacks before making your choices.
Like public service, family and friends can be a plus or a minus depending on your circumstances. Having parents on hand to take care of babysitting in an emergency and being close to your family and friends is vital for some people, while being within a day’s drive of the in-laws is out of the question for others.
If that means moving further away, do your research. Finding out what an area is like is much easier then it used to be. The police have resources which tell you the nature and number of criminal and antisocial events take place in each town or district and local papers can be a great resource of information on current events and local opinion on an area. But bear in mind that local opinion is often incredibly coloured by tradition, and not representative of reality today.
A Clear Idea Of What You Do And Don’t Want
When housebuying, many people start off with a budget, looking at the maximum they can afford and then looking the biggest they can get in their chosen area, which to my mind is like going to a gallery with a tape measure and asking for a picture so big to fill up a space in the wall.
Instead, why not picture your dream house and shop for it? This will mean having to be flexible on price and location but buying a new home is rarely one of the situations where all three sides of the triangle can be met. And since you’re going to be living in the home, isn’t it better to compromise on something like location or price than the building itself?
And What Sort Of Home Do You Want To Live In?
Given the choice I’m sure we’d all love to live in out of the way five bedroom country estates in the middle of town which are close to all the amenities, but not too busy..
Failing that, most of us would settle for something reasonably sized, reasonably priced and a reasonable distance from shops, schools and jobs. We’re reasonable people after all. And because we’re reasonable the climate crisis is giving us all cause to think. Nobody is suggesting that we should all turn our cars into greenhouses, never buy anything which hasn’t been used before and only drink water we collected during the last rainstorm but energy efficiency is a big deal. Modern buildings all have to adhere to restrictions and meet criteria of energy efficiency before they can be signed off.
Older houses weren’t often built with energy saving in mind but can be adapted. Houses built before the 1950s would have been designed to be heated with gas, coal or coke. These fuels all produced waste by-products which it was necessary to allow out of the home and into the atmosphere. And that means draughts. It’s said that typically, if you put all the gaps where the draughts get into your home in one place you’d have a hole two feet wide in your wall. Not everyone is a fan of double glazing in older houses as it can spoil the aesthetic, however, there are a number of manufacturers and artisanal glaziers who produce sensitive, architecturally appropriate windows and doors for older houses which will keep the draughts out.
Insulating the attic is another obvious method of keeping heating bills down, as is spending less on heating in the first place. Instead of turning the heating down, why not use technology to ensure it’s only on when you need it? Smart heating controls allow you to control your central heating from anywhere you happen to be, so if you’re running late and don’t need to heat the home for another hour, you can stop it from coming on. Or if the kids call to tell you they’re staying out, turn the heat off in their rooms and only have it on where you need it. Even in old homes the efficiencies you can make by adopting Smart environmental control technology can be surprising. So don’t automatically associate ‘old’ with ‘draughty and cold’.
Be Flexible on ‘Must Haves’ Too.
We all have personal preferences that we think we couldn’t stand to do without. Whether it’s an east facing bedroom which lets you wake up naturally with the sunrise or a kitchen with a surfaces you could measure by the acre, we all have our ‘this far and no farther’ features. But are they really the be all and end all? Couldn’t you cope with a south facing bedroom and an alarm clock that will tell you that the sun will be appearing in the window, fully risen, in twenty minute? Couldn’t you use workspace a little more efficiently, meaning that the kitchen could be smaller, potentially putting houses thousands of pounds cheaper and in more bijou settings within your range?
When you move into your new home and want to add to the entertainment and home automation facilities, contact Briant Communications. We have over 30 years’ experience installing a wealth of receivers, home audio visual, CCTV security and WiFi solutions. Simply fill in your details on our Contact Us page or call on 01273 465377