Living the adult life – buying a house

So we did it ; me and the boyfriend are homeowners since  a month now ! And it is great :).

It’s wonderful to  be able to come home everyday and enjoy being in the garden.  We are very grateful to call our new house a home and loved the experience of finding a house.

But I must warn you, finding a home is not an easy task.

Here is a short story of how we found our house !

 

As you guys now, I recently became an obgyn resident in the region of Rouen. Rouen, is located in Normandy, a very nice region of France to visit.

I have always wanted to live in the countryside and we also knew that very quickly after I started residency we wanted to find our own house  near to where I would work.

When you look for a house, you have to first define what you want. Otherwise you will drown in visits/ potential houses. This is actually quite difficult ! We are two people, with a different idea in our heads of we what we wanted …

So we took a pen and paper and wrote down what we wanted. These are the questions we asked ourselves:

• a big yard/ smaller yard : do you want to do some gardening :)?
• an older style house / a recent one
• the number of bedrooms
• do you want a house with some projects ? or a house with nothing to do in it where you can come with y
• and the list goes on

Once we were ok with the list, we started to visit houses. It was very frustrating at first. A lot of houses met all our criteria but were really old and not very well maintained. Or sometimes they were located in small villages that did not please us at all.

Be prepared : there is always something that will not be great, or that won’t fit the criteria. So compromise is key!

As a busy resident, I only had some weekends free to visit, and we really wanted to be settled by summer.

But after visiting tons of houses, we finally found one that we really liked.

 

 

It was old, big, had a big yard and nice views , it had all the things that we were looking for.

Here are some pictures of the house and garden.

 

The house is not furnished a lot yet, but it’s going to be over time 🙂

I am looking forward to live in the countryside and write about how I adapt to living here. It is after all a big change after living for 10+ years in cities were everything is walkable.

 

 

 

 

I now have to get used to use my car more, to take care of my plants and to embrace the nature surrounding my house .