For the second time in a year we do something your not supposed to do to often, we ar moving. Since a week or two we’re busy with cleaning, sorting out stuff and packing. Even the kids are busy. Often they throw stuff in the hallway or yelling for help if the boxes are to heavy. We’re pretty busy with it all. Alltough, packing all our stuff is a lot easier than last year, when we had a big clearence and because of lack of space a part of our stuff now wait patiently in the attic in the same boxes as last year.
So, we’re moving soon. Not even a year ago we put our house in Holland for sale. A big step. Now we bought ourselves a new one in an other country, in Swedish. Also a big step, a kind of defenitiv way at saying we’re going to stay here. A different experience as well. Where there was a moment in our lives we bought our first house in Holland and we learned the rules from freinds and did it in dutch, we managed to learn all the do’s and don’ts as well here and in Swedish. With every step we toke we came across new things. Bureaucratic things sometimes, suprising things often. Some of the things we’ve been trough in the process of bying a house:
When you intrested in buying a house and your in need of financial support for that, the first thing you do is going to the bank for a mortgage. It took a little while for we had an appointment, but we’re getting used to that nowadays. We met a nice lady and she had no problem to help us out. And even though almost everything vere takes more time and is full of rules, it took not even a hour to walk away with a piece of papper saying we would get a mortgage if we would find a house we wanted to buy. A sort of suprised where we about this, but it seemed to be a good thing we both were employed by the hospital.
With this papper, we could seriously looking for our dreamhouse. We got addicted tot hemnet, a website with loads of houses for sale.. There where houses we where more interested in so we made appointments with diffrent real estate agents. The biggest suprise here was that they were not so slick and that they turned out to be very honest. Just saying how it was, without making it better than it was.
And then, bidding on a house. That was not what we were used to. When you want a house, you can make an offer. That wasn’ t diffrent from what we know, but then. The seller can reject the offer direct or they accept it for that moment. Your bid is made public on internet in the hope someone else is intrested and makes an other offer. Waiting on a new offer can take a couple of weeks but also a couple of months. We really didn’t want that, so efter advice of people around us we did an offer with the condition they had a couple of days to react and if they accepted they had to take it of the market. Good advice because it worked. We bought ourselves a house.
The last part of buying our dreamhouse was to arrange the mortgage. So back to our nice lady again, who turned out to be our regelar bankperson now. Because of the fact we were already aproved and al she had to do was to formalizing it, it couldn’t take to long we tought. Both we as the sellers wanted that the sale was closed soon. So in the beginning of the third week, we asked the nice lady of she could arange to get all done befor the midle of april. We saw the panic in her eyes. She sighed and explained that it could take up to two weeks so what we asked was impossible. We looked att eachother and carefully said that the middle of april was in three weeks. Jaha men… (Swedish for yes,but… a very populair sentence here)…it was almost easter, she was going on a holiday and she was busy with other stuff. The realestate agent did say to us that first of may was also good for the sellers, so when we said that the nice lady smiled again and we went home. Att home I realised that it never would be on the first of may we could have the formal transfere. The first of may is ofcourse the international workers day and on that day nobody works in Sweden. I sended the nice lady a nice mail and asked here if she could push the date foreward. I got a mail back saying she couldn’t promise that, but she would try it.
So today, and not on the first of may, we signed all yhe pappers and got the keys to our new home. It was a good meeting and I onderstood all of it. And now we do the swedish thing and take a long weekend to start the next stage, remodeling our new home.
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