House situation
Jun. 8th, 2024 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fubThere were some hurdles with the mortgage, as the building we’re buying is not a standard house — so the mortgage provider needed some more guarantees. But we cleared all of those hurdles, and on May 31st we inspected the property one last time and then went to the notary to sign the papers for the official transfer of ownership.
On Tuesday evening, we had an appointment with our builder at the house, at 18:00. He spent 3.5 hours with us, going through the space, discussing possibilities etcetera. We already did a few things like put up a house number — the address had changed, so there was no house number visible from the street — and putting up a mailbox.
Today, we put up some outside lights with motion sensors, as the house is at the edge of the village and there are no street lights: it’s dark there at night. Not that there is anything to steal there (yet) but we might as well get this done now.
But the most important thing we went to do there was to simulate our furniture being placed in the space. With paper painter’s tape, we put the outline of the furniture on the floor. We had prepared for this by cutting out pieces of paper to scale and populating the original builder’s drawings, but doing it in 1:1 scale really allowed us to experience the ‘flow’.
In square meters, the house is equivalent to where we live now, but our current house has different rooms with walls that you can put storage against — and we need quite a bit of storage. The mover who came to look at our inventory remarked that we owned ‘more than average’. We can thin that out a bit, but we are certainly not minimalists! But in the new house, in such a large open space, you can’t put storage without making a ‘zone’ feel boxed in. So that’s going to be A Thing going forward.
But we have also decided on all the ‘hard’ infrastructure: a completely separate bedroom and where the kitchen has to come. Everything else will be ‘soft’ and can be moved around as we see fit. Who knows, we might live there for two weeks and decide to swap things around. That flexibility really feels luxurious.
As the address of the house had changed, the fibre optic cable terminating in our house was still registered to the old address, but luckily it only took a single email to rectify that. We had decided against getting a landline again — everyone we want to call us on the landline also has our mobile numbers, and the rest are spammers. And as we’re moving out of the city, the landline number would change anyway, so it feels like more trouble than it’s worth.
What also helped in that decision was that I selected a provider for internet that doesn’t provide telephone services in our area — we’ll be getting 1Gbps for less than I now pay for 100Mbps!
But reception on our mobile phones is pretty bad in the house. So I studied the map of cell phone towers for the Netherlands, and we are indeed quite far from the nearest tower on the network of our current provider. But there are two towers for another network that are closer — so we should have better reception if we switch to a provider that uses that network. That has been initiated as well, and with number portability we’ll keep our phone numbers too.
Meanwhile, we also need to clean up our (current) house so it is fit for showings. That’s a painful process, but we’ll get through that too.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.
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Date: 2024-06-08 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-13 09:14 am (UTC)I've decided to keep my printing press, even though I haven't used it in years. Owning it makes me happy and that is what counts.
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Date: 2024-06-13 09:23 am (UTC)I'm glad you have things that spark joy.
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Date: 2024-06-10 01:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-06-13 09:14 am (UTC)