Further down the buying process....

To me, one really important part of being green is a kind of behavioural permaculture - if I minimise my inputs, and maximise my outputs, surely thats a good thing for everyone, not just for me? I want my life to be as low maintenance as possible in the routine things, so my house purchase should be too - no trekking to the new town every other day for months, no sitting in a solicitor's office waiting to hand in a document, no (or not much) walking up and down to view the whole neighbourhood on the off chance of finding a for sale board - they're all on the web!

So these are some random thoughts on greenery a bit further down the buying process.

- in some ways, I'm quite an average person - though of course I am completely unique :) :). I'm going to be living in a town, not in a rural utopia, and I want to know about the policies of the local council. What's their recycling record like? Are there any local initiatives already on becoming carbon neutral, for instance? What impression does the official town website give? Are there any local grants to help with the costs of green installations? Walking around, whats it like? Yep, there is some walking.

- what comes next is, what did my heart say? It said, after much to-ing and fro-ing, Haywards Heath. It was also more practical for my existing business, which was a huge plus, but not the deciding factor. This step alone, by the way, took weeks of agonising and journalling, but I'm really happy I did that - I'm very confident in my decision that the town I've chosen is the right town for me, because I took my time over it.

- my first port of call in finding out about the above, has been rightmove.co.uk - bless them for their map view showing houses within a chosen area and a chosen price range. Changing over between the map view and the satellite view also became second nature. Other websites do a map view too - globrix.com for instance, but I always found rightmove easiest and biggest. The street view button, showing the views up and down the street, is also great - it means you make many fewer fruitless journeys, you can see that industrial estate, you can see where the bus stops are, all sorts of things.

- otherwise, whats struck me as being very green in the house purchase lark has been the use of email attachments and scans. I put my own house on the market just before HIPs came to an end - and I never got a hard copy, it was a simple pdf document, thankfully. And it arrived very, very speedily because of that. And I could send it on to my conveyancer and estate agent equally speedily, just press the forward button and bingo. The survey on the house I'm purchasing, and the confirmation I'd paid for it, were also sent in this way. Its cheaper too, of course - packages of the size I'm talking about cost about a fiver to send securely through the post. Those fivers add up, so the saving was quite a nice little bonus.

- and of course, in such a big legal contract, the biggest most of us will ever make, when I correspond by email, I have a record of who said what to who, and when. Of course, if its my mistake, thats a big oops, but in general, it works in my favour :)