We’re moving.
We’ve bought a new house and will be moving into it this coming Friday. The transfer of the keys took place at the end of last week.
Our current house has been sold and the transfer of the keys will occur next Monday.
Needless to say, none of this happened overnight.
Back in April, our current house was finally at the stage that most of its minor irritations had been fixed. It was no longer just our house, but had slowly evolved to become our home, and none of us could imagine leaving it. We had come to love it as an old and trusted friend.
But life is full of surprises, as they say.
We have an unwritten list of interesting properties in the [Willemspark](http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willemspark_(Amsterdam)) neighbourhood; houses that, if they were ever to be put on the market, would warrant, at the very least, a cursory visit. And so it occurred that one of the houses on our unwritten list went up for sale. It was mere happenstance that I came to be looking at the housing market around the same time, or I would have been none the wiser.
I called the selling agent the next day and we went to view the property that afternoon. To our surprise, we liked it a lot. We were struck by the more practical internal layout, that is better suited to a family with children. It’s also considerably bigger and semi-detached (not that we don’t like to have neighbours, but it’s nice to be able to go around the side of your house with bikes, have workmen come into the garden without needing to traipse through the house, etc.).
Within 24 hours, we thus went from being perfectly happy with our current home (or so we thought) to light-heartedly considering purchasing a new one.
Well, those airy considerations soon turned into earnest deliberations. No stone was left unturned in treading a path towards what is — let’s face it — one of the most important and drastic decisions of one’s life. Never before have I thought so long and hard about a decision: not when resigning or accepting a new job; not when getting married; not when deciding to have children; not even when deciding to buy our current house.
The pressure of wanting to make the right decision — make that ‘not wanting to make the wrong decision’ — weighed heavily on me, and I became brooding and irritable. What should have been a fun thing to think about (at least, I like to think it could have been) took the form of a worrisome burden, a predicament from which I sought an escape. I began to curse the day that I discovered the house was for sale, because now I could think about nothing else.
More than a month passed, during which time we totalled five viewings. My friend Geoff got to see it when he was here for Koninginnedag; Sarah’s folks saw it during their May trip. By that time, I was virtually convinced that any house that you’re still uncertain about after that many viewings is one you shouldn’t buy, on that basis alone.
But in the end, buy it we did. Not that that signalled the end of the emotional oscillation; oh no. We had set a transfer date three months into the future, so that we could forget about the thing that had consumed our lives for the last month and however many weeks, and just enjoy the coming summer.
During that period, however, I came to doubt the wisdom of our decision and yes, I must admit, there was a brief period that I even regretted it. We were giving up a stable family home and for what? We weren’t even dissatisfied with our current home, so it seemed that what we were doing was entirely unnecessary; greedy even.
The period of recriminations passed, however, and a final, emphatic line was drawn through them when we performed the final inspection on the day of the transfer, at which time we finally got to see the house empty. In that state, it came into its own. The previous owner’s furniture had been a far cry from our own taste and I hadn’t realised until the inspection just how much that had tainted my ability to view the intrinsic qualities of the house on their own merit.
In the meantime, we had taken advantage of the buoyant housing market in Amsterdam and put our own house on the market back in June. It was important to list it before half the country (and thus half the potential buyers) buggered off on holiday for half the summer.
After a period of frenzied preparation, photos were taken, a brochure was made and the house went on the market. Weeks of having to make ourselves scarce during viewings ensued. Everyone from Dutch TV personalities to foreign families with children viewed the house.
After one month, the house had managed to attract its buyer and the deed of sale (koopakte) was drawn up.
An amalgam of joy, melancholy and relief clouded my mind the day we received the telephone call informing us that a deal had been reached. Even though the legal point of no return had long since passed on the purchase of the new house, it wasn’t until the old one had been sold that it truly felt as if an unstoppable momentum had been attained and that there was now only one way forwards.
So, we went from deliberation to decision, on to doubt and then resignation, and finally arrived at enthusiasm. It’s been a long, exhausting journey and we haven’t even moved in yet!