The Saturday Shuffle: Tag Teams, Tiny Revolutionaries, and the Truth About House Hunting

While we were navigating the sale, we were simultaneously deep in the buying process — endless weekends looking at suburbs and properties, trying to get my husband as enthusiastic as I was. (Remember that part about him growing up in the house we were selling? He had serious attachments and was not as keen as I to move on.)

Getting to Know Areas (Or: Becoming a Suburb Stalker)

We spent weeks hanging around different suburbs, walking local streets, sitting in cafes, watching people at the shops, trying to feel whether a place could actually work for our family.

I'm not client-facing in my role at EWR, but I've heard our team talk about the most important parts of relocating so often that it's become second nature. So when it came to finding our own next neighbourhood, I knew exactly what to do. We needed to spend time in the community — grab brunch, walk the high streets, and go to the supermarket. You need to feel the vibe of an area before you can know whether it's truly for you. No amount of scrolling through listings or reading suburb profiles will tell you what an hour on a Saturday morning actually will.

The Saturday Shoe Shuffle

Open home inspections became our entire life for eight-plus weeks. House after house after house. Shoes on, shoes off, shoes on, shoes off. Every single Saturday, sometimes multiple in one day, traipsing through other people's homes trying to imagine them as ours.

One thing we figured out early — and I'll credit one of our magnificent consultants for this — was to look at homes as a team, one at a time, taking turns so the kids didn't have to come inside every house. And honestly? This is underrated advice. Kids at open homes are bored, they want to touch everything, and they're loud. Taking children to open inspections is a bit like smoking in public — it's unnecessary and quietly frowned upon by everyone in the room. Keeping them happy in or near the car meant happier kids, happier parents, and a much more focused inspection.

I have to say, our two were genuinely brilliant about it. Patient, good-humoured, and well-behaved — right up until about the fifth house, at which point they staged a small revolution. And honestly, fair enough. By that point, I was about done with looking at houses myself.

Which brings me to the other thing our consultant taught us: research and eliminate. Don't trudge through ten properties that will never be right just to feel thorough. Do the work upfront, build a shortlist of your best options, and go in focused. After a couple of inspections, take a breather and regroup. Trust me — you are not missing out by skipping the ones that don't stack up. Working smart saves time, saves patience, and saves your kids from staging a revolution before lunchtime.

It's exhausting. Each place blurs into the next. You start forgetting which one had the good kitchen, which one had the dodgy bathroom, which one felt right the moment you walked in. You're trying to stay open-minded but also protect yourself from getting too attached, because you know most of them won't work out. By week six, I was so tired of taking my shoes off that I could've cried.

Finding a Broker Who Speaks Human

Finding a financial broker we actually gelled with turned out to matter more than we expected. You need someone who'll be straight with you about the numbers without making you feel like an idiot for asking basic questions — and crucially, someone who can tell the difference between what you could spend and what you'd actually be comfortable spending. Those are very different numbers, and having someone help you figure out where you sit on that spectrum, without judgment, makes the whole thing considerably less terrifying.

Putting in Offers (And the Three-Contract Juggle)

Once you find the one, the stress shifts to a different gear. Offers, negotiations, contract reviews — it all happens fast and feels completely overwhelming. Having a good solicitor comes into play more than you'd expect.

Ours was reviewing three contracts simultaneously at one point — three houses we liked, three negotiations running in parallel. I don't know how they kept it all straight. I certainly couldn't. It's chaos. But it's the kind of chaos where having the right people in your corner makes all the difference.

And Then We Found It

And then, after all of it — the suburb stalking, the Saturday shuffles, the shoes on and off more times than I can count — we found it. The one that felt right the moment we walked in. The kitchen we'd been picturing, the street we could imagine doing the school run down, the house that made all eight weekends worth it.

I can't say it was always fun, but I did enjoy the hunt. And I can see why our consultants love what they do — there's something genuinely thrilling and satisfying about finding the right fit for someone. We had a home to leave and a new one to move into. Which, as it turned out, was just the start of an entirely new kind of chaos.