Moving time again?

It seems that my little wings don't like to lie still for over the past 6 years I have lived at 8 different addresses (plus stayed several times at my parents' home in between moves). For someone who lived 17 years of her life in the same house it's quite a shock really - and it has certainly made my Criminal Records Bureau checks I had to have each time I got a new job in care work very long and demanding things to fill in. But despite all of this T and I are considering yet another relatively short-term move...

When we moved into the flat we are in now we felt incredibly lucky. For the money we are paying (which is ridiculously high just because we are close to the city centre) we got a lovely light flat. Honestly, some of the places we looked at in our price range were so depressing I shudder to think we could have ended up living there. They were worse than student abodes. But as time went on we quickly realised it wasn't perfect - our neighbour downstairs is a DJ or something and works nights so he complains when we try doing our housework in the middle of the day at a weekend (when else are we going to do it?!) and then comes home early hours of the morning and talks on his phone so loudly it disturbs us if one of us is sleeping in the living room (which we've had to do a lot recently due to ill health). The sound proofing in this place is pretty much non-existant. Even more annoying is we have electric storage heaters which although good (most of the time) at heating things (and we do use an oil radiator more often to save us money) the heat just goes flying out of the flat as there is zero insulation. Every room has an outer wall as we are the corner flat and between us and the sky is a thin ceiling and an uninsulated loft with a metal roof. It's blooming freezing in here most days.

But despite all these problems we have no money to put a deposit down on renting a place elsewhere. There are houses for a similar rent as our flat in neighboring villages which now that I work in the city centre have great bus links and would be a viable option for us now. But we just do not have the money to ake the move and we decided to stay here until we had enough money to put a down payment on a house of our own instead of moving around loads and loads.

That is until a colleague of mine found out she was moving abroad for 18 months and wanted someone to rent her house. For the same price we pay for our one bedroom flat we could have a 4 bedroom house in a lovely village. Our landlord and landlady would be people we knew and trusted. We would have a spare bedroom so when long-term illnesses hit neither one of us has to sleep on a creaky, uncomfortable sofa bed. And even better we wouldn't need to have a deposit of nearly a thousand pounds meaning we would get that money back from our letting agent and it would go a long way to helping us out right now whilst T is still waiting for his new job to start and we could start saving it back up again during the 18 months we are living there.

Sounds perfect, right? There's only a tiny problem - getting to work. This particular village is not on an easy bus route. If I could drive to the park and ride site I'd be laughing. If mine and T's working hours coincided we'd be fine but as he's going into healthcare he will be working some shifts. There is a bus that goes direct from the village to the city but only 3 times per day and it takes a lot longer meaning if I am feeling rough my days will be much longer (I've done the commuting thing before and it is rather tiresome). We are planning to go see the house and my colleague this week to further discuss our options - we don't want to let a great opportunity go by but we also don't want to find ourselves regretting moving further from work.

On the plus side - if we move into a house I can buy the dancersize dvds I've always wanted with no fear of turning my neighbour into a crazed lunatic bent on my destruction... that in itself is enough to make my mind up!!