At 6:15pm, my notary phoned and said the money was in their account. That has to be one of the fastest French bank wires I’ve ever seen — which makes a few points scored by my bank’s regional office after my previous post. Since I’d taken the afternoon off already (having planned to sign), I was in Nice and able to reach the notary’s office in fifteen minutes, so they agreed to sign this evening.

At 7:30pm I finished signing the last paper (goodness there were several, and most of which I’d already seen via my real estate agent) and was given my keys. At 8pm I was in my new home! First homeowner impressions:
o “Oh my god if anything goes wrong I have to figure out how to fix it on my own.” Of course, I already knew this, and have been preparing methodically for it, so the thought didn’t actually take me by surprise. But it was the first thing I thought nonetheless!
o “Cool, the arches are neater than I remembered.” Just waiting for the electricity to be turned on in order to take photos with enough light to focus.
o “I need a ladder to open the bedroom window…” This is a small window in the “underground” part of the apartment, near the ceiling. With my height of 5’11″/1m80, standing on the tips of my toes and with my fully-extended arms only just reaching the bottom edge of the window, that’s saying a lot. High ceilings, yay!
o “The kitchen is bigger than I remembered!” It’s a really nice size and is well laid-out. I can hardly wait to start cooking in it.
o “It’s so quiet and cool… a nice breeze flows with the windows open.” It smelled a bit musty from having been closed for so long, but as soon as I opened the windows a lovely breeze aired it out in a few minutes. And it was noticeably cooler than the building entry, with loads of light from the patio.

Photos won’t be coming very soon, unfortunately, because my PC has been packed for moving tomorrow morning (I’m on my trusty old laptop) and I don’t know when internet will be set up in my new place. We’ll see!

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This entry was posted on Monday 26 May 2008 at 22:19 and is filed under Journal, La France. Tags for this entry: , apartment, France. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.