Our new house:

Having spent 6 years in a safe, modern detached house on a development in a quiet village, what on earth made us go for a Victorian terrace in a town? A number of factors led us towards this property - in no particular order:

• Build Quality.
  When buying the first house, I knew almost nothing about buildings, and was simply considering the obvious factors such as size and location. But the more time I spent in the house, the more I realised that it wasn't a quality piece of engineering. For example, the prefabricated roof trusses make the loft unusable, plus the 600mm spacing demonstrates that the builders were working to the extremes of the regulations. The first floor was similar - joists spaced as far as you could get away with, supporting the thinnest chipboard flooring you can buy. All perfectly legal, but not exactly confidence inspiring...
  
  
• Location.
  Being in a village was great, unless you wanted to do something! Because everything involved a car journey into Norwich city centre, we tended to simply not bother - especially as Norwich has become very "car-unfriendly". Now, we are just a short walk from the shops and amenities, and we're even considering giving up one of our cars!
  
  
• The "playground effect".
  When I first moved into the close, I thought it was great that it was a safe environment for kids to play. After a few months, I changed my mind about this! Don't get me wrong - I love children. But when you've got 10 or 20 of them running up and down in front of your house using your front garden as a playground, it gets very tiring. When the footballs came out, certain kids used to use our 2 cars as goalposts! Of course, politely speaking to them or their parents generally had little effect, so we often had to "find" jobs to do in the front garden so we'd know whose parents we'd have to send the car bodyshop bills to. The sight of us looking like miserable "Victorian parents" often had the desired effect!
  
  Most of the time it wasn't as bad as it sounds, but it came in "waves" and there were occasions when we were driven mad by it - it's something that you're almost powerless against because most kids don't respect authority and their parents never seemed interested in what they got up to, as long as they were out of their hair. Things have changed since I was a kid!

So we were looking for something solidly made with a reasonable garden. Our main criteria was to avoid modern developments and also villages, as most of our problems seemed to stem from these factors. We knew that we would have to compromise on a number of other things, especially considering our budget in view of the property market over here - for example, a detached house in a nice non-estate location was almost certainly out of the question. But then a 100 year old solid 9 inch brick wall made from heavy red brick makes a pretty good barrier.

After a lot of ups and downs we eventually settled on a Victorian terraced house on a busy road in the town, just a few hundred yards from the river and the shops. It had been recently double-glazed which dealt with the worst of the road noise, which you only really hear in the front two rooms anyway. And thankfully, the rumble of traffic is much easier to ignore than the noise of screaming kids and balls hitting your front windows and cars!

Because of the main road, there are double-yellow lines outside the front - this means you never have to look at someone else's van that's been parked across your drive. Instead, we get a nice view of some older Victorian buildings opposite that have recently been restored. Of course at certain times of the day we get to look at the poor people stuck in traffic, but that just adds to the variety! Because of the nature of the street, traffic can't really go any faster than 20mph most of the time, so it's really not as bad as we feared.

Luckily there is parking and a single garage at the back, but unfortunately one of the cars has to live in the garage! Perhaps one day we'll turn it into a large double with workshop space, but in the meantime I'm hoping I can make something useful from the cellar. The loft is also quite large with lots of potential, so one day I'll be able to build a workshop somewhere. Unfortunately, there is too much that needs to be done to the house before I can think about these things!

More to follow...