House Hunting and Finding a Castle

Today we went to see the (only) "government" house that is available to us.  It was okay, but not great.  We are supposed to just accept the accommodations they provide for us, but we don't take too well to being pushed around, so you can imagine how it went when we were told that they would no longer pay for our temporary lodging after the 25th of this month if we refused the house. Thankfully David found some items that were still in the house that made it easy to get his chain of command to back him up when he tells the housing office that we will not be taking the house.

We had an appointment to see another house, but had an hour to kill before we could do so. So, we went and found ourselves a castle. The town we were going to be looking at a house in is called Amstenrade, and they just so happen to have a castle in their little town.

"The original castle, built by Huyn van Amstenraedt, was a castle with three round towers and one square tower. Remains of this square tower are still present in the current square tower, built around 1609."

 This castle belonged to the same family, though sometimes being passed down through a female heir, from 1350-1779 when it was "sold to the Liège banker Nicolaas Willems. Willems demolished the outdated castle, muting the canals, but preserving the square tower. According to the original plans, the new castle would be a U-shaped building, but due to the lack of sufficient funds, the east wing was scrapped." Nicolaas, who was unmarried, died in 1788 and gave everything to his niece, Baroness Victoire de Hayme de Bomal, married to Count Claude de Marchant d’Amsembourg. The castle has been in this family since that time, with the current owner being just 3 years younger than I am. 

We did finally go see the house that is a possibility for us to live in (unfortunately I don't think we're going to find a castle in our price range), and we liked it a whole lot better than the first one we saw, but we are still unsure whether it is "the one". As far as the kids are concerned, there is no question - it has a huge back yard and an in ground pool. The detractor for us is the fact that it is a shared back yard with the owners (a really nice younger couple, but they have no kids).  So, we will keep looking and see if we can find anything else that might fit our needs.