HOUSE HUNTER: Some houses are coming tantalizingly within reach of our theoretical budget

A FIVE-YEAR-OLD showed me the way, literally. She was clutching an oversized map (it was actually an A3 colouring sheet with pictures from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which she couldn’t see over the top of). Being taller and having nothing obscuring my sight, I went in the direction she ordered me to go, on the way to what she insisted was a castle.

The young lady in question, Tara, is one of my wife’s two nieces and her godchild. She is also headstrong enough to drag a grown man off a perfectly comfortable couch on a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon in autumn. Looking for a house in these conditions is as new to me as the epiphany which I had afterwards.

We were looking at the papers last week and noticed that some houses for sale, although still too expensive for us, are coming tantalizingly within reach of our theoretical budget. A house in Mount Merrion on Dublin’s southside was on the market last week for 675k – I kid you not; not far from the grotesquely overvalued Trees Road, which used to have “Kenny Built” on the “For Sale” sign and lots of zeros on the price tag – hence people would exclaim “oooooooooo”.

Maybe people need to sell, or they’re finally setting a price that looks realistic to the average punter.

Mount Merrion is the kind of place I have mixed feelings about. I’m from there, so clearly it can’t be all that good. I am attracted to it as much as I am repelled by it. My late father got away, as far as London. The rest of my family who grew up there, went in every direction as workers in the aviation industry, yet all live not far from it. My younger brother worked in hotels in the UK. He’s back in the homestead. And I ended up in Carlow, via Germany and Belfield, and now I’m in Fundrum.

In Mount Merrion I can walk to the local pub, across the road from the sweet shop where we got milk teeth and Sherbet dips as little brats, seeking out penny sweets as nonchalantly as a cruise missile seeks out refugee camps in Kandahar. I kinda like it, though never wanted to live so close to home. Anyway, it wasn’t an option, either for myself or many who grew up there in the 1980s.

My wife, on the other hand, has a very strong sense of origin, which in the past came up against my apparent sense of rootlessness. It occurred to us on the way down to her folks on Saturday last, that we had no plan when looking for a house to begin with: our search was predicated on what we either liked or didn’t at a viewing, but no more than that. All that was clear was that we didn’t want to be on the road anymore, and that meant Carlow wasn’t the option for us. We reacted. We felt. We didn’t think.

For my part, I had always been under the misapprehension that being emotionally repressed was the same as having my brother’s Teutonic sense of calculation. I, like a fool, thought I was my German grandfather’s grandson and not my Irish father’s emotional progeny. Imagine my surprisewhen we came to realise that both my missus and I are emotional beings and that, as herself pointed out, we need to be more businesslike about our dealings.

Until now, we’ve been like the five-year-old, indulging every whim and desire as we zigzag our way to an incomplete destination. By the way, we were going to a castle, which was in fact my sister-in-law’s nearly complete house, built affordably on a site and very nice it is too.

The calculation we have lacked has been as counteractive to our buying success, as another thought was as liberating: what we buy now is not necessarily something for the rest of our lives. It might even work out as yielding a nest egg if we ever move. What’s clear now is that we need to revise our game plan.