Jon has had a successful first day of house-hunting in Cork. Yesterday he went in to the Cypress office where he’ll be working and the admin helped him sort through our list of houses that we’d started during our internet research. She went through each listing with him and gave some insight about good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, family friendly areas, etc. With her help, we cut our initial list of 20 houses down to 10–a much more manageable number for Jon to actually see in person during the few days that he’ll be there.

The houses he looked at today were all in a suburb of Cork called Douglas. It’s about 5 minutes outside of the city center but it’s more family-friendly and you can get more spacious homes than in the city center. He got to see 3 houses, 1 of which he loved, 1 that was a decent back-up contender, and a third that he’s not even considering any more. Here are a couple of photos from the first house that he liked the best:

Here’s the front of the house

The view from the front yard (that’s Cork Harbor in the distance)

Kitchen

Small back yard (with no lawn to mow!)

This is a 3 bed, 3 bath home in a new development. They allow pets here, which is awesome! All 3 of the places Jon looked at today allowed dogs, so it’s looking promising that Bota will get to move with us. There were 2 other families looking at this house today, so it’s possible that it won’t even be on the market by the end of the week when we’re ready to make our decision. He still has a few other houses to look at that we’re really interested in so we’re not going to sign a lease on this place right away. Tomorrow he’ll be going to a few more houses that were high on our list, so we’ll see how that goes.

My next post will probably be later this week with some photos of our new house!