House hunting in Melbourne

Have you looked at the real estate sites to hunt for houses in your area? I’ve been looking at houses in the country/hilly suburbs of Melbourne as I have a dream to return to ‘country’ in the not too distant future. I’ve been using the feature on real estate sites to process criteria but what comes via email doesn’t always match what I’ve asked for – the process isn’t perfect yet.

I love looking at the photos of the houses and their gardens to get a feel for what they look like but get frustrated when some don’t publish a pic of at least one bedroom, or the fantastic lockup workshop they promote, or perhaps the gardens. They talk about features but don’t always photograph them, have you discovered that?

One feature in particular I’m looking for is space – away from neighbours. I really long for peace and quiet again and now our girls have grown up, not having neighbours who have loud and long noisy parties is a criteria. And the families around us are shaping up to get noisier as their own children begin to reach the pre-teen and teen years. Not to mention the increased traffic in our street as our city council have taken to greed and allowed many people to subdivide their blocks and grow more units – thereby doubling the number of buildings in our street alone in the past 14 years.

So, with that in mind, if the photos I view show side fences and a roof of a house next door right up against it, no matter if the house meets the rest of our criteria, it gets knocked off the shortlist.

When we lived in South Australia in the 80s, we had a beautiful view of wide sweeping hills from our kitchen window and the front verandah and the girls only had to walk 500 mtrs down the road to be amongst paddocks, horses, creeks, frogs and all sorts of delights that young children revel in. I used to love going on walks with them every Saturday and one of my sisters would visit regularly with her two young sons to join us. I long for those type of days again and who knows, perhaps before our grandchildren come along, Graham and I will return to a countryside property for our family to enjoy on their regular visits. I hope so!

P.S. I wonder how many agents for the areas I’m interested in might actually see this post? I’m talking Lysterfield, Kallista, Belgrave, Narre Warren and similar.