Our House, In The Middle Of Our Street

Time for a new entry. We’ve been keeping busy since Geoff went back to the Golden State of California.

First of all, the major news in the McKenna-Macdonald household is that it looks like we have a new house! After a series of bids and counter proposals that lasted about three weeks, we were finally able to find the middle ground and agree on a price with the owner.

We’re expecting to take possession of the property in mid-December and are therefore deferring the delivery of our belongings from the US until then. No point in moving everything into the current house only to move it out again within two months. Besides, we’ve lived without our stuff for so long that I no longer miss a lot of it.

We expect to sign the deed of sale at the notary’s office at the end of next week. It would have happened already, but the owner of the house spends a lot of time abroad and had to cancel the last appointment when he found he could no longer keep it.

Of course, we don’t actually have to wait until we move into the new house to get started on the search for all the things we’re going to need for it. The last few days have therefore been spent looking for essential items of furniture.

Happily, we’ve already found the bed we want and it’s a Hästens. We looked at a bunch of beds from various manufacturers — adjustable and plain, two-piece and three, boxspring and spiral — but in the end nothing else felt as good as the Hästens beds. We chose a non-adjustable three-piece model and are very much looking forward to spending our first night in it. After the crappy water-bed we’re currently saddled with, that will be sheer bliss.

We’ve also found a few good candidates for a dining table and some chairs to go with it, so we’re well on the way to having the most essential items sorted out. Hopefully, we’ll soon chance upon a suitable couch and a couple of armchairs.

Most of this stuff has a delivery time of six to eight weeks, so we really do need to be looking for it now, if we want to have it by the time we move in. In fact, it’s probably already too late for some of this stuff.

As if that wasn’t enough to be thinking about, we’re considering which set of wheels we’ll need in the future. Greenwheels is all well and good, but having used and appreciated the service now for a couple of months, I realise that there are also definite disadvantages to choosing this form of mobility over having one’s own car.

Accordingly, I’ve been reading car brochures over the last couple of days, something I’ve never done before. The effusive style of the marketing prose and the impression of status and grandeur that it attempts to provoke in the reader make me wonder if people like me are really supposed to own cars. A nice car is a nice car, but it doesn’t make me a better person if I own one; it’s not an extension of the owner and I don’t need a one to bolster my own self-worth.

Perhaps the problem is just that we’re looking at quite expensive cars, which I’m guessing are usually sold to people who care about being perceived in a particular way by the people around them, not just people who care about getting from A to B in great comfort. I, on the other hand, don’t care how I’m perceived; I just care about practical features and have less eye for style and elegance, which I can barely even discern in a car’s design.

Anyway, we’re entering yet another exciting period in our lives. Eloïse is going to grow up in a nice, quiet area, close to Amsterdam’s most beautiful park. Almost as importantly, we get to live there, too. If all goes according to plan, we should be able to move in within seven or eight weeks. Needless to say, we can’t wait.