Ten

We are looking at houses.

Having finally sold our old house a few months ago, Aksel and I are once again house-hunting. It took us 10 months to sell and I got very disheartened, what with all the constant cleaning up that it required and the little or no interest that was shown. In the end, I refused to look at anything that was for sale before we had managed to sell ours. But several bottles of Cillit-Bang! later, we received an offer on the condition that we could move out quickly. No problem, we said. But we couldn't find, fall in love with, place an offer, have it accepted, and move into our dream house in just 14 days, even if we had been the most super organized people (which we are definitely not). So we decided we would rent for a while. And then we were very, very lucky to be able to rent a good friend's awesome house, which she had just finished renovating.

And we have all settled in really well here, but we know it is only temporary and we'd better get looking for something else before the market starts recovering. Knowing us, it will take a while to find the right address.

Aksel and I have a bit of an ongoing competition between us about the number of countries that we have visited. He is waaay ahead of me having managed to sneak in a few good ones in the last few years as part of work trips (for example, Bangladesh and Bulgaria) and on account of a trip to Cuba and a supposed "work" trip snow-boarding in Canada. We have also been known to extend this competition to a list of all the homes we have ever lived in. Considering that neither of us moved around very much as children, we have quite a number of homes on the list. But this one is much less interesting competition-wise, because we've been together for ever and from about 1992 or something, we have had the same address as each other.

So, we are out house hunting tomorrow. By my calculations, this next one will be the tenth address that we have shared together. Hopefully, it will come with that extra bedroom/office space that would be so nice to have. And of course be within our budget, especially in light of the financial crisis.