House Hunt

The last few days have been a blur of house viewings. Some of you, dear readers, will wonder to yourselves, "Why are they viewing houses? Didn't they already find a place to live?"
Yes--we do have a short term rental lined up (we'll move in on Tuesday) but we have been viewing houses to purchase since we had some in-processing days assigned to us. We have looked at old houses, and brand new houses, attractive houses, and horribly disgusting houses. Many of them made us wonder aloud to each other once safely sealed back into our car, "Why on this earth would someone put paisley carpet in her livingroom?"
We've viewed houses in Mildenhall (the little village just outside of Lakenheath) and Bury St. Edmunds which we love but is a little far. Friday we saw 6 different properties and to be honest, although I wasn't crazy about any of them, they all started to look exactly the same.
There is one house that I have absolutely fallen in love with--it's a beautiful three story townhouse in Mildenhall. We have one more hopeful house to view tomorrow night, so we'll have to see what happens in the next few weeks with this international house buying stuff. Should be interesting, especially considering the dual nature of the house choosing process.
We are looking for a house that serves two imporant and distinct purposes: it must be a place that Travis and Lego and I can comfortably, happily inhabit for the next 3.5 years. Perhaps more importantly though, it must be the sort of house with long-term American rental appeal. If we choose to let* it out for a few years after we leave England, it will be easiest for us to use the military network for marketing and managing the property. This means we'd most likely be letting to an Americn couple/family, and the house should be a) close to the base(s) and b) have the general features that make Americans choose one rental over another (ie more than two bedrooms, more than one bathroom, rooms larger than 6x6 etc.) British houses are very small and cramped; it's difficult for incoming Americans to adjust to a drastically different house style than what they're used to. "American" style houses let much more easily here than older style English ones.
[*that's "rent" to you Yanks.]

A new friend and I drove down to IKEA in London yesterday to get a few things for outfitting the horrible little rental that we will soon be occupying. We plan to have the Air Force hold on to our household items until we move into our purchased home (hopefully this fall) so we won'y have any sheets, blankets, dishes etc. and the only clothes we have are the ones brought over in suitecases from Texas.
We needed exactly two plates, two bowls, two drinking glasses, one large frying pan with cover, and a set of silverware. (We are preparing to put down a sizable down payment for our new house and wastefullness is not tolerated in our family these days--buying the entire set of silverware was a splurge that I can only attribute to my low blood sugar at the time...probably because I hadn't had breakfast in an attempt at frugality.)
IKEA was, as always, a lovely experience, and we found all the things we required. As a matter of fact, I was able to find the same set of dishes which Travis and I use as our actual daily plates, which were packed up during the move. I bought two additional matching drinking glasses etc, so that rather than having one random tiny set of dishes that don't match anything else, I can simply add our newly purchased set of two into our larger set when it arrives and is unpacked into our new home. That made me feel pretty good about myself...!

We are missing all of you and though we are having a wonderful time, we're feeling a bit alone in our little corner of the world. Will probably be much better when we start actual work next week and we get to know the other Air Force people around. Talk to you soon!