Flat Hunting

Susan was able to join me in the search for a flat on Wednesday. We went out with an agent from Foxtons, which is the UK's largest letting company. He showed us four flats. While none of them were in the exact location we thought we wanted, they were all vast improvements from the flats I had seen on Tuesday. While we like each of the flats for various reasons, none of them jumped out at us as the "perfect one" while we were looking. We then met with an agent from Chard to show Susan one of the seven flats that I had viewed on Tuesday. I knew that this flat was not really what we were looking for and it was really small, but the location was awesome and it was across the street from a perfect little communal park (which are very hard to come by - especially ones that allow dogs).

After Susan put her veto stamp on the flat we saw with Chard we had a chance to talk a little bit more about the flats we had viewed with Foxtons. We both decided that the 3rd flat we saw had just about everything we were looking for except we were very unsure about the location. It was about a 15-20 minute walk from Notting Hill which is where we had focused our search. So we decided to go walk the area around the flat to see if it would be suitable. We found that within a few minutes walk there was a tube station, local market, dry cleaners, Holland Park, and High Street Kensington. Holland park is very quaint and is the most densly wooded of the parks in London. It was beautiful with lots of walking paths as well as tennis courts! High street Kensington is a street lined with all kinds of shops and stores including Susan's favorite London clothes store, Jigsaw and quite a few others that are sure to become favorites as well.

Since we now loved the area and the flat there was nothing else to wait on. We contacted our letting agent, Michael and told him we wanted to put an offer down. Sidenote - Michael is originally from Scotland and ends all of his phone conversations with "cheers mate!" He was very helpful through the whole process. Anyway, after a few more bumps in the road (the story of our move) we were able to sign a one year lease. We have been busy collecting furniture and other things (mostly from IKEA) since our flat is mostly unfurnished. We should be fully moved into our place by Friday (since that is our last day in our serviced apartment) and be able to post some pictures then.



Other Things of Note:

One big reason to not drive in London besides the obvious crazy drivers and the whole driving on the left side of the road thing... how the heck are you supposed to know who goes and when to go? This crazy stop light is about half a mile from our serviced apartment.

We're off to do some sight seeing for the first time since moving! Hopefully we'll have some good pictures to post tomorrow!