Home is where the heart is... or something

It's been an awfully long time coming (and by that I mean, I wasn't the kind of girl who dreamt about her wedding being the most perfect day of her life - instead, I dreamt about houses. I drew floorplans. I thought up decorating schemes. I plotted out the ideal permaculture vegetable garden when I was 12, for heaven's sake). 


Yes. One and I are starting to look for a house to buy. We're in a bit of a complicated situation at the moment, house-sitting for friends who are currently overseas - and looking that they're going to remain that way for a while - so we have a stable place to live for the moment, but we've also inherited their two cats (more on them later).


We've known for a little while that our deposit will be enough to start properly looking come July, and I know it's early, but not being native to Melbourne, we don't really have much of an idea about the areas to look in, much less buy in.


Ideally, we would like to stay on the western side of the city (because that's where all our connections are), and we were thinking we wanted to stay closer in, so we've kind of been looking from Airport West down to Newport - and then today, we went out to Taylor's Lakes for an appointment. Driving through the suburbs, One made a throwaway comment that our money could get us a 3 x 2 out there instead of the poky little 2 x 1  houses that we've been looking at.


And there would definitely be room for a puppy and a veggie patch, both things that I know are part of my dream house (and not just because they were always in my pictures as a kid) (One is not so sold on the puppy, by the way - or the veggie patch - gardening is not really his thing).


So now I suppose we have a difficult decision to make. While on one hand, I would love to buy an older house in need of some renovations, with a little room to extend, at the same time, I would also love to buy a house which doesn't need any work, one we can move into straight away and I can start my veggie garden.


I suppose if everything in life were easy, we'd all get bored very quickly.