Buying a house?

I never thought I would be the kind of person who bought a house, I liked the convenience of renting
- being able to leave easily if you don't like the neighbours, area, get a new job and so on
- having someone you can call if something goes wrong
- not having to worry about replacing carpets or furniture

and the list went on.

But recently I've not been liking the fact that I can't easily find a new place to have cats, or modify, or even if I do modify it I can't be sure that I won't be kicked out next month and I didn't like paying someone else's mortgage, so we started looking at buying.

I moved down to Burton-Upon-Trent in July 2012, from Leeds to follow my career. We had lived in Leeds for 11 years. Richard had a house to sell and a job to find so for 6 months I lived with my parents and once the house was sold we got a rental in Burton and then 6 months after that, Rich came to join me.

We started looking around Burton at houses in June 2014 and found the most perfect detached house with a manageable garden, cute through lounge and dining room. The current owner was the sweetest quirky lady (and husband, though we didn't meet him) and the family had at least 2 VWs.
The only problem was the location - the local pub was a dive and the beer was off, and it was up a hill. A very steep hill.

I also have become very disillusioned with Burton recently - there are a few restaurants, but nothing that Richard likes. A few good pubs, but nowhere that felt like "my" local. So we decided to start looking at Derby. We'd been on a couple of good nights out at a pub and the shopping was lovely, so we figured that maybe a smaller city was better for us than a small town! So we started looking...

and I'll tell you about our search another time. For now this is my girl cat, Frenzy, preventing me from crafting both IRL and on LOTRO