A home! A home! (ahem - I mean a bijou residence with roof terrace)

Hurrah! The flat hunt is at an end. But before I begin, can I just point anyone who has been complaining about infrequency of updates to the comments feature? We're easily disheartened by silence at the other end.

We are the proud tenants of a top floor flat in Gascony Avenue, West Hampstead. Well, West Hampstead is the closest tube station but the flat is almost in Kilburn really. My theory is that you can always tell when a London suburb is a bit desirable by the way it stretches across half the city. Hence you have Clapham North, Common, Old Town, South and Junction and you see flats overlooking Tooting Common advertised as Clapham South when actually they're on the other side of Balham. Likewise you have Hampstead Heath, Hampstead Village, Hampstead Garden Suburb, South Hampstead and West Hampstead. But as I said to Jules, we'd need to be training for a half-marathon before we'd be running around the heath - you'd have to run up an entire page of the A to Z to get there.

What happened was that I rang an agent about a flat in Maida Vale and he said that it was already let but he had two others similar and one in West Hampstead. So I went to have a look, thinking it's always good to be driven around by the agent.

I met Jules at Maida Vale tube at 2 and we went to see a 1-bedroom garden flat in Maida Vale for 260 a week, which was OK but turned out to be a basement flat and the garden was very small. Then we walked across to St Johns Wood and caught the tube to West Hampstead to meet the agent.

The Gascony Avenue place was a whole house that had just been entirely redecorated inside, new kitchens, bathrooms, carpet, etc. Our new residence is the top two floors. You walk in on the first floor, go up some stairs and then there's a living room, bathroom, kitchen and the smaller double bedroom plus the door to the roof terrace, which has new decking. It's probably only about 8 or 9 feet wide but quite long, easily big enough for a table and chairs and a bbq. Then you go up more stairs and the whole top floor is the master bedroom. It's all very nice and light - white walls, beige carpet in the hallways and stairs and the rooms themselves have that pale laminate flooring that looks like floorboards but isn't. Anyway it was advertised at 300 a week but we offered them 280 and they accepted so that is good. Now we are in negotiations about furnishings - basically you have to ask for what you want so we have submitted a long list - we'll see how we get on. The only thing is that they don't provide kitchen stuff but that seems to be standard these days from what we have heard.

The shower fitting in the bathroom is a bit weird and multi-directional. Jules turned on the tap over the bath and soaked the three of us - luckily it was a hot day and the agent was a fairly laid-back aussie bloke who didn't seem to mind getting drenched if it meant he met his sales targets for the week!

We move in on Monday - at least that's the theory, I'll be impressed if they get all the furniture in and put up the curtain rails and curtains by then.

And in breaking news, Jules has just been offered the job at Credit Suisse to start on 4 July. I think it is a 6-month contract. Which is exactly what would happen once you have chosen a flat for proximity to British Land! Still at least all he has to do is get on the Jubilee Line and stay on. And fourteen stops later, there he will be!