House hunting

At the end of last week, the possibility arose for me to go and work in Belgium for a short while. We discussed and investigated this opportunity over the weekend. With Abi still on maternity leave, it would have been (just) possible for all of us to move there for six months, and come back in time for Abi to return to work in November. However, we came to the conclusion that it would be too much stress in too short a time, for not enough tangible benefit.

But because we are still interested in moving to a different country so that Alex and Fiona can be exposed to another language at an early age, we came up with a different plan: move to a bigger house here in Edinburgh this summer, spend the next three years getting Fiona up and running, getting Alex launched into school, getting myself more experience as a technical contractor, and getting Abi cross-trained on something other than mainframes, and then move to the Netherlands in the summer of 2007.

Note that this is still a provisional plan, and is subject to change.

What it does mean is that we’ve started the search for a new house. It’s a daunting prospect because the Edinburgh property market is insane, and finding the space we want at a price we can afford is not going to be easy. We have identified a couple of target properties already, though, and we plan to take a look at the first one tomorrow evening. More details when we have them ourselves…