A New Home

I haven't really be posting about this so I suppose it's about time for a catch-up entry. Because I'm lazy, I'm going to handle this with a timeline in point-form:

• Christina and I met back in mid 2011 and started dating
• I ended it a few months in because I was stupid
• We stayed friends and did New Years together at the start of 2012
• Not long after that, we got back together and have been so ever since.
• We started talking seriously about moving in together a few months ago. It was a rational decision more than anything else: I was living in Bussum and she was in Amsterdam. Since I was now working in Amsterdam too, I was spending an awful lot of time in her tiny apartment and she rarely came to my place. Moving in together just made sense.
• We started looking for an apartment in and around Amsterdam with varied success. Some of the places we viewed included:
  • A really nice building with a view of the train tracks and no floor.
  • A canal house in a quiet neighbourhood with a great view, but small. So small that we worried if my bed would fit in the bedroom.
  • A big, modern apartment right on a canal, with a shoddy (tenant-installed) floor and an entrance facing some pretty sketchy apartments.
  • A big, modern apartment right on the Ij (the river on which Amsterdam Centraal sits). It also had no floor.

Before I continue, I want to get a couple tangents out of the way:

A Note About Floors

The Dutch have a very odd way of viewing apartment rentals. Here, an "unfurnished" apartment essentially means four walls, a ceiling, and a concrete slab of a floor. No light fixtures, often no wall sockets, and mostly no flooring. Typically people move into a new place, then go to Ikea and buy new flooring, then bring it all home and cut/install it themselves. Then, when they leave, they take the floor with them.

So there's this whole sub market of people selling their floors from previous apartments, or buying additional flooring to make up for the extra space they have in their new apartment.

As an outsider experiencing this for the first time, let me tell you that it really is as nutty as it sounds. And if you ask a local why they do this, the response (if they defend it, which not all of them do) is: "Well what if you don't like the floor?"

A Note About "Agents"

The Netherlands, like many European countries employs a vampiric system of rental real estate agents whose job it is to promote and show the apartments to prospective tenants. Typically this means posting an add on a few websites and then fielding calls and occasionally meeting people during working hours at the suite to show it.

The fee for this "service" is usually a one-time fee of one month's rent on top of whatever you pay the landlord. I am positively amazed that such a system continues to exist in a free market economy.

The Decision

So, back to the story. We ended up opting for the apartment on the Ij. The process of taking possession has been long and complicated, full of forms emailed, printed, signed, scanned, emailed, printed, signed, and scanned again only to email to the agent, but we now have keys. The people from XS4All will be coming by in a few days to install our new super-awesome optic fiber internet connection (100Mb/s baby!) and our stuff will be moved in on Saturday.

It's really all quite exciting. I'm moving in with my girlfriend. It's a little scary, but honestly this just feels right. We mix very well, communication is great, and we're happy together. I'll be posting the before, during, and after shots on this site over the next few months.