Ireland Training Lesson Three

Lesson Three: You have to be in your top form.

After breakfast, Ker and I decided to hit the ground running in our race to secure a house.  The hotel was not somewhere Ker could work as its’ Wi-Fi was spotty.  Also, it was uncomfortable, lacked food choices, occasionally choked with tobacco smoke, and expensive.  Having to ask the front desk to take care of the yelling drunk smokers directly outside our window wasn’t fun either.  It became apparent that we could not stay at Bewleys for long. 

We had been looking for weeks at the daft.ie website which claims to list available house rentals.  From the comfort of our often-changing beds in Oregon, we viewed houses all around Ireland from the humble to the ornate.  All this internet-ing produced a list of our top 20 homes.  Since we had extra energy after our breakfast, we jumped in the car to view them in person. This was our first mistake and showed me how out of house rental practice Ker and I had become.  You see, we expected to go by the house and then call the letting (translation: renting) agent to get a view of the inside. This letting agent would drop everything and let us in to the house. Anyone who has rented any home knows that that is not the way you do things—you call the agent first!  We re-discovered this the hard way.  While it was fun to view all the different parts of the country 50 minutes north of Dublin, we discovered that the online ads did not actually have the correct location for the homes.  Instead, we would be staring at an empty field right where the red locator dot told us a 5-bedroom home should be.  Needless to say, we got back to the hotel around 7 pm, completely exhausted (some of us had been up for 36 hours by that point), not having had any luck on the house front.

We got up the next day to do it all over again, except we decided to get Irish cell phone service on Ker’s phone so we could call the letting agents and greatly improve our chances of landing the perfect home.  This was only marginally better than the day before.  To his credit, Ker called 14 agents in the car while we were travelling.  They fell into three camps:  the house was already rented camp or the not answer their phone camp, or—my favorite—the house that is clearly marked available immediately is not available and won’t be for an indeterminate amount of time camp.  Which meant that all the searching we had done in the last 2 days and the weeks before amounted to nothing more than a very long car ride.  The silver lining is that the girls got to catch up on their sleep.  In that time, we were able to view a couple of homes neither were move-in ready.  The one in the village of Ardee had floorboards jutting up.  Just goes to show that some places only look good in photos.  Yeesh. 

The house situation was frustrating but also illuminating.  We rediscovered through trial and error the in’s and out’s of renting.  I’d forgotten how intense it all is.

Surprisingly, our outlook on life may have also gotten in the way. Ker and I live a don’t-take-no-for-an-answer lifestyle.  We plow through life taking it and molding it into what we want from it.  There are reasons for this--good ones and bad ones.  But, the house situation was Ireland’s way of teaching us to wait.  Wait for an agent to call back, wait to see the inside of house which looks great outside only, wait so you are not looking at an empty space where a house should be, wait before you fall in love with a house that is already rented or not available until “the owners get around to leaving”.  It’s a different world here and we are only beginning to see it.