I thought house hunting would be fairly straightforward. Pick a place, make an offer, done. Grown-up thing to do, grown-up process to follow.
Instead, it has become one of the most unexpectedly revealing experiments I’ve run on myself in years.
The Version of Me That Had a Plan
Around March 2025, I had a ChatGPT-generated house hunting plan. A weekly schedule. A colour-coded Funda bookmark folder. I was ready.
And then I didn’t do anything.
Weeks passed. Tabs stayed open. The inner monologue ran on a loop: Is it the right time? Are prices about to crash? What if I buy somewhere and then my job changes? What if I put down roots and then realise I don’t want to be rooted here?
That last one was the real one. Not the market. Not the mortgage. The quiet fear underneath all the practical excuses: what if committing to a place means committing to a version of my life I’m not sure about yet?
December unclogged something. I can’t fully explain it — but January arrived and something had shifted. Rent started to feel like a decision I was making every month, not just a default. Time to actually do this.
The biggest mental block wasn’t the market or the money. It was putting down roots when nothing felt settled yet. The reframe that helped: I don’t have to figure everything out first. I can figure it out as things change.
Why Three Very Different Areas
Once I got serious, I didn’t land on one place to focus on. I landed on three — and they each represent a different version of me fighting for the wheel.
Amstelveen is practical me. Close to work, familiar streets, easy Amsterdam access, social life already nearby. It makes sense on paper. Apartments, mostly, which felt manageable. Safe, in the way that also sometimes feels a little small.
Hoofddorp came from a friend. “Have you looked there? You get so much more for your money.” He wasn’t wrong. Terraced houses within budget, actual space, room to breathe. Future me, maybe. The me who wants a garden and a spare room and a life that doesn’t feel squeezed.
Haarlem is the romantic in me. Smaller Amsterdam energy without the prices that make your eyes water. Canals, character, a city that feels like it has a personality. Every time I visit I feel something. Whether that feeling is worth the commute trade-off is a whole other conversation.
Three areas. Three personas. None of them wrong. All of them pulling in different directions.
Getting Out of My Head and Onto Funda
The thing that actually helped first wasn’t finding a makelaar and calling a mortgage advisor. It was two weeks of scrolling Funda with no pressure to act.
Just looking. Getting a feel for what was out there, what the prices actually meant in reality, what layouts made me feel something versus what left me cold. It sounds passive, but it wasn’t — it was calibrating. By the end of two weeks I had a much sharper sense of what I wanted than any checklist had given me.
Then I signed up with a makelaar. That order matters. Walking into those first conversations with some Funda literacy meant I wasn’t starting from zero — I had opinions, I had questions, and I wasn’t just nodding along. They connected me to a mortgage advisor early on too, which gave me actual numbers to work with instead of vague anxiety about what I could afford.
I also asked everyone. Colleagues, friends, anyone who’d bought in the Netherlands recently. Every experience was different. Some had nightmare stories, some had smooth ones. All of it was useful — not as a script to follow, but as preparation for the fact that this process has a lot of moving parts and none of them are fully in your control.
The Saturday Morning Test
One of the best pieces of advice I got came from a colleague almost as an aside: visit neighbourhoods on Saturday mornings, not weekdays.
Weekdays are dead. People are at work, curtains are drawn, the energy of a place is nowhere to be found. Saturday mornings tell you the truth — who lives there, how they use the space, whether the streets feel alive or hollow.
I’d loved Haarlem for years in a general, romantic sense. But which part of Haarlem? That required actual time there, walking streets I hadn’t walked before, sitting in a café I’d never been to, noticing what it felt like at 10am on a Saturday when the city was just waking up.
That’s when it stopped being abstract and started being real.
What Viewings Actually Taught Me
I went into my first viewings thinking I had a system. I came out learning I needed a different one.
Now I arrive early and walk around outside first. The street tells you things the listing photos don’t. Then inside: I try to feel the energy before I analyse the space. Is there enough light? Can I actually see myself here, not just imagine it in theory?
I take videos. Way more useful than photos for remembering the actual flow of a space. I open cupboards, stand on balconies, stare out of windows. The furnished ones are easier to imagine in at first — but I try to test the empty spaces too, because furniture hides a lot.
And then there was the makelaar embarrassment I didn’t see coming: apparently they can see your comments on listings. The unfiltered, typing-to-myself notes I’d left on a few properties. Reader, I learned that lesson quickly.
What’s Actually Shifting
I started this process with Amstelveen apartments as my sensible baseline. I’m ending up increasingly drawn to Hoofddorp and Haarlem terraced houses — more space, more character, more of the life I think I actually want rather than the one that’s simply convenient.
But that tension is still there. Convenience vs space. City energy vs room to breathe. The version of me who optimises for now versus the version who’s building for something she can’t fully see yet.
I haven’t resolved it. I’m not sure I’m supposed to yet.
House hunting, it turns out, is less about finding the right property and more about figuring out what you actually want your life to look like. The houses are almost beside the point.
What I know now that I didn’t know in March 2025: the mental blocks were never really about the market. The practical stuff — Funda, the makelaar, the mortgage advisor, the Saturday morning visits — all of that is manageable once you decide you’re actually doing it. The harder work is the internal audit happening underneath all of it.
That part, I’m still doing.
More on this as it unfolds — including what I’m prioritising now, what I’ve ruled out, and what one particular viewing taught me about what I really want.
