Finding a house - the research.

I'm in the middle of moving house, and I realised I needed to write about the whole process, for my own sanity, and to work on getting the whole process to be as green as possible. So here it is! Moving house, the green way.

I've always been concerned about green issues - I remember reading about polluting oil spills in the library when I was fifteen, mumble-mumble years ago. Time to bring it home, literally - and doing it from the ground up.

It can be done bit by bit, of course - it has to be, in lots of ways, I just wanted to think about greening the whole process of buying a home, in all sorts of ways.

I last moved home 12 years ago, and in that time, the whole process has become completely different: getting and assessing information, even. The internet! Well, we have it, its not going away, and personally I'd be lost without it.

Flashbang news: the internet is green! My research about what town to live in was almost entirely done on the net, and these are the questions I was looking at:
- can I get to London easily? Can I get to Brighton easily? These are my two bases, but I don't want to live in either one of them.
- can I walk to the main shopping centre and the railway station? Can I walk everywhere, basically?
- what facilities does the town have? - shopping, banking, sports, community groups, cinema, even hospitals and dentists, you know the sort of stuff.
- whats the atmosphere like? How safe is it to walk around late at night?

Even this last one, there was some startup research I could do on the web. I came across a great little site about Haywards Heath, very ironic and understated, and I thought to myself, if a town has a bloke like that living in it, chances are there are others like him, so its probably the town for me.

Looking at these issues meant that the only two serious contenders were Haywards Heath and Crawley, because of their transport links between Brighton and London. Only then did I go for a wander about each of them. I did a lot of walking (very green!) and my sister and a couple of friends drove me about both places, looking at potential areas to purchase in. It was important, though, for me to do a lot of it by walking, because thats a really important part of it all, to have everything within walking distance.

And they both had that, more or less. And thats where personal choice came in: which place do I like best? Where am I most likely to find kindred spirits nearby? And although there was a tiny little crescent of housing between the two main stations in Crawley where I thought I *could* find my kindred, the answer had to be Haywards Heath for me: its an organic market town, thats grown over hundreds of years, its really quite tiny compared to most of the places I've lived but it feels vibrant and alive.

So, thats my first blog on the green way of moving house. I hope everyone that reads it will come back for more