fub

A long time ago, we took a look at a U-shaped bungalow that was for sale. Same-level living is attractive to us, and this bungalow had lots of light and space. For several reasons, we never made an offer. And ever so often I think back to it and feel regret that we didn’t at least try.

One of the national pastimes is to look at every house that’s on offer on the site of the largest real estate association, and to find the weird/ugly/special places. As an idle thing, we had created an alert for bungalows within a certain radius of Nijmegen with a minimum size and a maximum asking price, and spend every so often scrolling through the houses on offer.

And then one evening, we found a very interesting object: a former child daycare facility in a small village somewhere south of Nijmegen. It would need a lot of work to make it a home, but it ticked quite a few of our boxes: single level, large open space, free standing… Certain nice, but it would be a lot of work. And then we said to each other: “If not now, then when?”

So we called the selling real estate agent, made an appointment to take a look that Saturday (we were the first in a long line, people came even from The Hague to look at it!), arranged for our own real estate agent as back-up, went to look at the house again with him on Thursday, discussed our bidding strategy with him, arranged for a mortgage guarantee and put in our bid — a cool 31k above the asking price… The whole process was stressful, not in the least because the day our bid had to be in was the day before my father’s funeral, so we got to arrange everything for that on top of the arrangements for the funeral.

And then, the next week, we got the confirmation that our bid was accepted. Then we got the concept of the sale contract, and we had a long list of things that needed to be changed! Not in the least the fact that, if read in a certain way, the municipality could fine us 250 euro per day once we took possession of the property!

This is because the address of the house changed, as the main approach is now from the other side. The contract between the municipality and the current owner specified that they had to create a car entrance and two parking spaces on the lot within six months. If they failed to do this, the could be fined 250 euros per day. And the current owner has, so far, not created this entrance, and we would become the official owners after this period of six months had passed. We needed assurances from the seller that the municipality would be cool with us taking some time to create the entrance. That took some time, but we got that confirmation today, so we signed the contract.

It has been hellishly stressful (on top of all the other stressful things), but now the real fun starts with arranging for all the renovation work. There are quite a few things to do with lots of interdependencies between work that is done by different people. Luckily we have an excellent relationship with a builder, so let’s see what comes out of that.

The inside of the house: one big open space with enough irregularity that you can create different ‘zones’. There are some separate rooms for bathroom, toilet and storage. There’s windows on three sides and an awesome row of windows on the roof for maximum light!

The back door. You can see how the roof is split in two: in between is a row of windows to let light in from above. I like the small windows on the right side, and the little door is cute (and has a fun story to it).