We have a house!

As of today, we are the proud owners of a house!  Well, to be precise it’s not a whole house, but one half of a duplex.  It’s 188.3 square meters (2027 square feet) and sports five ‘bedrooms’, four on the second floor, and one front room on the first floor (it’s technically the ‘storage room’).  One of the rooms on the second floor is ‘open’, i.e. doesn’t have a door, and could be described as a family room, although we’ll be using it as an office for now.

The major selling points were the overall organization of the house,  a lovely back yard (not too big, not too bland, and has a wooden deck), the laundry room that is located on the second floor (genius!), enough bedrooms, a garage that one can enter from inside the house, proximity to school/daycare/sports-center/swimming pool/huge shopping complex/main roads, and it’s below the main snow line and somewhat sheltered from wind.  We also liked that it’s built in 1996, which means that it’s not so old that major renovations are looming, but also that it’s built during a ‘quiet’ construction time which should mean better workmanship.

The only thing that is a little iffy is the fact that the living room, dining area and kitchen all collide into one area, and it might get a little bit cramped.  We’ll have to see!  But I had to remind myself that when we started on this eternal house-hunt I actually preferred not to have a separate ‘dining nook’ and ‘dining room’ as is customary in Iceland.  So I’m getting what I initially wanted, but now we have to see if it works.

One criteria that got effectively dropped was ‘proximity to work’.  After a year of walking to work in two minutes, this will be a big change, but I’m hoping to be able to bike in some days, and work remotely on others.  We are in a spot where I should be able to bike in in about half an hour, so that’s not terrible.  Or shall we say, it could have been a lot worse!

So yes, today we went to the real estate agent where we met our seller.  (Side note: This being Iceland, it took us about 15 minutes to discover that we had friends in common with our seller when we initially looked at the house.)  We went over all the paperwork, signed our names a few times and then it was time to pay.  We decided to do it ‘the modern way’ and I paid our seller by transferring money straight into her bank account using the online-bank website on my android smart-phone.  While doing so I had the bank send a receipt to the real estate agent, which he then promptly printed out.  (Ok, I fib a bit on how easy it was here, since I’d gone to the bank earlier to enable me to move a large sum of money from my account to another account online.)  The whole thing was a bit surreal.

Then we got the keys, shook hands and headed to our new abode.  We were very pleased to find that our seller had cleaned the house very well, and all we really need to do before moving in is patch up a few nail holes and perhaps touch up a wall or two.  At the end of the day we’d made two trips to the house with assorted bits and bobs, and shown it to some family members and friends.  The kids seemed to like it there, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that there’s a playground on the other side of the road from us!  Our seller also told us that three or four new families have recently moved into the same street, with young children, so apparently the playground is getting a bit of use again since most of the ‘original’ inhabitants now have teenagers on their hands!

Ok, enough rambling.  Here are some pictures!

We brought the kids along for our second visit of the day, but neglected to bring the camera.  Anna has already chalked one of the stones in the back yard pink, and Bjarki has biked on the patio.  I think that’s a pretty good start! 🙂