If you received a letter from me in the past several months, you might remember that one of the quotes I used was where we were told, “Everything in Ireland takes twice as long as it should.” I think he was underselling it by a bit…It would be great if things only took twice as long as they should.

Here’s how our day is going:

1) We received an email saying that the landlord of the property we wanted to rent found another couple.

2) I texted our mechanic to see if he’d gotten to look at the car we are trying to buy…by 12:30, it still had not been delivered to him…(it was supposed to be there first thing this morning). When we called the dealer…he said he is trying to find someone to drive it over…but it will be there by end of the day today.

(note: our current rental car needs to be returned on Wednesday)

3) I went on Daft.ie (realty site in Ireland) to look for property in the Clontarf area, and searched for all 3 bedrooms in Dublin 3 & Dublin 5 (3 & 5 are two of the postal areas in Dublin.) If you look at the picture above, you’ll notice all of the red pins noting 3-bedrooms to rent…notice any empty areas? Yeah, me too. Now to be fair there are 2 places in Clontarf…one is way overpriced…the other’s listing shows several photos of a coffee table and furniture with sheets over them…I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking at places to rent, if the best you can show me is a couch with a slipcover, the first two questions that pop up for me are 1) It that really the highlight of the apartment? & 2) what is under those slipcovers?

4) I called one place when they asked how many in our family, I said “6,”  they said, “the place is too small.” Liz called back to explain that one kid was a toddler & we’d still like to look at it…the person texted back in 30 minutes to say the place is no longer available.

I’m beginning to get a bit paranoid.

Needless to say, we’ve decided to expand our search to outside of Clontarf at this point. However, there is still something in the back of our heads that thinks that something in Clontarf will pop up at the last minute…seems to be how this whole project is working at this point anyways.

Hope your day is off to a better start.

On the plus side, I have a bank account now. While we were talking to the person setting up our account, she told us she was the mortgage officer and gave us some tips on what to do to obtain a mortgage…key item was saving the amount your mortgage will be for 6 months. While we’d still have 6 months to go, our success with renting made us wonder if perhaps we should look to purchase. Not what we had in mind, but we expected there would be places to rent.

We’d appreciate your continued prayers for our house hunting.