Moving to our new home!

Since Mathilde had been made permanent at her school, we decided it was time to take a big step forward in our lives, and buy a place of our own. So after a lot of hunting on the internet (mostly by Mathilde), but only a couple of visits (and just one by me!) we found the place of our dreams. Well, given our budget, anyway ;-). The location was great (handy for both of us to get to work, near a train station, and in a nice neighbourhood without too much of the concrete that’s unfortunately quite typical for the Cote d’Azur, around), the flat was great (right size, modern but original, and with a swimming pool as a nice bonus – albeit a communal one) and the place was immediately available.

So having thought about it a couple of days, we decided to make an offer, which was accepted! After waiting for a few weeks for the wheels of French bureaucracy to turn, it was finally time to sign at the notary office in Nice. Which, this being France, involved initialling and signing A LOT of papers (including a report which outlines the risk for earthquakes, for example ;-). Having finished the formalities, we happily headed back to Cagnes – after a quick celebration drink at the bar next to Nice train station (not really a glamorous place for it, but hey…).

Then started the minor task of shifting all the stuff across to the new place. We had already made quite a bit of progress filling boxes during the weekend before, so were already partly set to go. Progress was a bit slow in the beginning, since we had but our small Clio for the operation – thankfully the new flat was also in Cagnes-sur-Mer so the distance was a lot shorter than last time… Actually, once you put the seats down, the Clio can fit a surprising amount of stuff. So we managed to shift a fair amount of boxes during the first few days.


Things got easier during the weekend, as Mathilde’s dad, Joel, came over all the way from Angers to help out. We also got to borrow my parent’s Scenic, which was a big help. Stephane, a colleague of Mathilde’s came over to help as well. Things didn’t get off to a great start… First I managed to scratch the Scenic driving out of our old car park (car parks in the south of France tend to be ridiculously cramped), but that was but the start of our troubles. Having emptied the car with Stephane, I figured it was time to open the front door. Two of the keys looked a bit similar, and what did I do? Put the car garage key into the front door! And wasn’t able to get it out, of course. Nothing to do but call the lock smith and wait… Only cost us about 250 euros ;-). Things went more smoothly from then on, and by the end of the weekend we had managed to shift pretty much all the stuff that fit into the Scenic. We even had time to show Joel Haut-de-Cagnes, where we met up with my parents for dinner. I even had time to pop into Monaco “briefly” ;-).

For Monday we had booked a van, the plan being to shift all the big stuff. I started off with Joel in the morning – the plan was that some fellow Finns would come along and help in the evening. Actually, by the time Hannu was able to come and help, there was only the fridge and a plant left to move, pretty much. Funnily enough, the plant gave us more problems than the fridge (the damn thing just wouldn’t fit…). The beers afterwards felt very well-deserved indeed (we even begrudgingly gave one to Sami who joined us last minute and carried a couple of wardrobe shelves upstairs… ;-).

More pictures here.