Househunting - more news

It’s Friday night and last weekend’s newspaper is still lying unfolded on the dining room table. Last week has gone by unnoticed. Fortunately we didn’t need to look at any more houses, because we finally found a house that we were both very pleased with: it’s a so called Lockwood home (inside and outside is built in timber) which gives it a certain cosiness and it has a huge garden with a jungle feel to it (with banana and no citrus trees this time). The old lady that lives there now has evidently lost control over the place and needs to move to another house. Investing in some garden tools might not be such a bad idea.

After we found the place we immediately got in touch with the biggest local banks to see if we’d get a loan from them. At first they didn’t seem too interested to take two sole traders /zelfstandigen/ with two kids and no money on board, but now it looks like one of them will definitely give us a mortgage. So one problem is solved. Scott was over the moon and wanted to celebrate this weekend with a romantic candle light dinner , but I wanted to wait till everything was official. The agreement we signed says that if we don’t have a positive builder’s report and a loan the sale won’t take place. I thought, we’ve got the loan, but I still need to be sure about this builder’s report.

So, all looked right, until this morning, when I met a builder at the property for a quick look around. Scott had spotted some mould on the outside walls and he wanted me to show them to that guy. Before I realised the builder had already found more moist spots and traces of old leaks. It looked a bit like the old lady had tried to disguise some of the moist issues in the house by putting a bed against a wettish wall, having the floors covered with new carpet etc, putting curtains in front of it, painting some of the walls. You will understand that we got a bit concerned and now we will have to ask someone else for a second opinion. These wooden houses seem so much harder to assess for us, because they’re built in a different way.

While ringing some building companies that are specialising in those building reports I spoke to a man who had a really weird accent. I couldn’t recognise where he was from, until he spelled his first name: ‘F-R-A-N-S’. He told me he’s originally from Roeselare in the Belgian province of West-Flanders. It took us 5 seconds to switch to our good old dialect. As Frans has been here for 30 years, he was struggling a bit to speak his mother tongue, but after a short warming up he was pretty fluent in it again, using all these words and idioms that make me feel so good. Maybe one example for the linguists/dialectologists amongst us: ‘Ja’k, ‘k jeune mien ier’.

Anyway, we might ask Frans to come and have a look at the house in order to find out as soon as possible if we need to start househunting again. By next Friday I should be back with more news. Keep your fingers crossed!