Monday, May 27, 2019

Catching up: Moving!

Here's how buying a house works in Amsterdam (this is pretty specific to Amsterdam, rather than the Netherlands as a whole, and is apparently a right-this-minute phenomenon. We picked exactly the wrong time to move here and buy a house. Womp womp):

-You decide you're sick of renting and sick of not having a place for guests to sleep and sick of the all-night shouting from the bar down the street.

-You spend at least 30 minutes a day scouring Funda (the Zillow of the Netherlands) for any new houses that fit your specific but somewhat flexible criteria.

-You go to the open house, where you see at least 20 other couples who look exactly like you looking at the house.

-You say as little as possible, in case the sellers don't like non-dutch speaking expats.

-You go back and forth with your real estate agent (called a makelaar - one of my favorite dutch words) over what the house is worth versus what people might bid on it.

-You guess at a number, it is stomach-churningly higher than the asking price. You have the makelaar place your blind bid.

-You get a call saying that you've been outbid.

-Repeat until you either buy a house or just give up and rent forever.

It took us four full rounds (and 5-6 partial rounds) of this game before we accidentally bought our house.

Wait, but how do you accidentally buy a house?

You go through steps 1-3 and decide that the house is fine but needs a lot of work, you decide to bid a number that seems too low for the neighborhood, but gives you enough money to do the renovations that you would need to do. You assume that's the end of that, until your makelaar calls and tells you the house is yours...and then you start to panic.

We signed the contract on the house in June, but didn't actually close on the house until December. We spent those six months obsessively drawing floor plans, making pinterest boards, finding a contractor, and getting a mortgage which was the hardest bit (in a moment of things-working-out-okay, we were actually very lucky that we had 6 months until closing as getting a normal Dutch mortgage - instead of a higher priced ex-pat mortgage - turned out to be quite labor and time intensive and the pressure would have really been on for a normal house closing).

All I'll say about the renovation process is: get a contractor who speaks the same language as you do. And send pictures of EXACTLY what you want things to look like. And visit the site every day. Oh, and get things in writing. And make sure all of the electricity works before they pack up.

Penelope learned to walk just before we moved, in an apartment full of boxes. The problem with having a company pack up all your things for a transatlantic move is you don't really understand how much stuff you have. When the movers who were moving us to the new house said we would need 90 boxes, I assumed he was grossly over-estimating. Incorrect. 90 boxes was just barely enough. To be fair - we have acquired an additional human since that first move and she has accumulated an irrational amount of stuff in her short little life.

The boxes were good for entertaining Pip because they gave her lots of things to lean on and walk to and also because she loves putting things into and taking things out of boxes, which kept her occupied while we tried to do actual packing. This was going really well until I realized one day that I couldn't find my wallet. After five hours of digging through every already-packed box I finally came across it buried deep in with some toys and dishtowels that she had packed. So helpful.

And then we fiiiiiinally moved in and thus began the impossible task of finding a new place for everything in a space that is different size and shape from anywhere we've ever lived. It has been a challenge that has involved several trips to Ikea (with at least one more in our future), boxes being upacked and repacked, lots of hiding things under beds, furniture rearranging, and second guessing of just about every part of the process.

We still have a lot of projects to do and are often plagued with the "was this the wrong choice" anxiety but it has been totally worth it for the mornings when Pip is up and ready to play at 7:30, so we all just put coats on over our pajamas and take our coffee out to the backyard. Its been satisfying to make such a small space work for us. It is by far the smallest home we've ever had, but it is so nice to know that we're using all the space to its potential. There are no rooms we never go in, no closets we never open.  We're so excited to continue our Dutch journey in this little house with its unpronounceable street name.

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