More Housing Thoughts!

I know I'm really not supposed to be online on a Thursday, but I've been doing some cooking and thinking (rolling dough and cutting biscuits gives lots of thinking time!), and have a few more thoughts to put out here that may or may not help bring clarity to the situation! My first post probably needs to be read to make sense of this one LOL.

Firstly, if the only issues with our current house were the indoor air quality and the need to extend the house, we would probably risk renovating as the reno's would hopefully help solve a few of the indoor air quality issues in the process. However, seeing as we are very much an outdoors family, the issues of proximity to neighbours and the busy street are of significant concern - and renovating can't solve these problems. This morning has shown me just how much my daughters need to be outside regularly - they are instantly soooo much happier as soon as we come outside to play! (Fortunately the neighbours are behaving themselves at the moment!).

I was also thinking about WHY we bought this house in the first place...

• It was the only affordable home that was able to be lived in straight away without major renovations required.
• It oozes potential and character - two things that were very important to us then.
• Its proximity to those things I've already discussed earlier, as well as the school we had originally planned to send the girls to. Its across the road from Kindy, so also only 3.5klms away, but we are highly unlikely to send the girls there now. And also at that stage I was still at the Dr's regularly (fortnightly) as we battled constant illness and ongoing testing to try and make sense of what was going on with the girls. However in the past 6 months (since starting our Biomed Program) I've only been there about 6 times all up and most of those times were simply for referrals/scripts or the girls regular weigh in's and dealing with Miss G having pneumonia!
  
• The landlord where we were renting was not one of the better ones, and her property manager was possibly the worst we have ever dealt with, so our renting experience at that time was not overly pleasant - especially seeing as between us we had rented a considerable number of times throughout our lives and were used to higher levels of service.
  

So of those initial reasons we bought the house, the only truly valid ones that would still apply are the fact that we had had a bad renting experience and that could be repeated (although I suspect that with the amount of questions I need to ask about any prospective home I would soon work out if the property manager was going to be helpful or not!), and that it was affordable financially - obviously we only have a finite amount funds to allocate to housing!

Unfortunately, we now can't really consider potential and character as critical components of future housing as *potential* means the need for renovations, and *character* is really quite a superficial element in comparison to providing a healthy environment for our family to live in. Also the need to be close to our Dr is not as high, and the close school is no longer our preferred option.

And from that I started to questions...

What are the most critical things we need in a home?

• Less toxic house (so no recent reno's or need to do reno's, no gas, minimal fragrant gardens, considerable distance to neighbours/other hazards plus other things as per my list)
• Bigger house (even just a 3rd bedroom would suffice) with lots of room outside for kids and vegies
• Located closer to our prefered school - which is in a semi rural area - so that covers the desire to be further out of town as well!
  
• Still be within our local Organic Fruit & Vegie companies delivery area!

I'm sure there's going to be more to add to this ongoing saga! These are just my scattered thoughts from this morning :D