A big decision: moving to the country (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Remember this one? Or this one? Or how about this one? We've been thinking about moving away from the big cities for a while now and we've finally made our decision:

We're moving to the province of Drenthe.

As you can see from the map on the left, the province of Utrecht is one of the most densely populated areas in the Netherlands (after Zuid Holland and Noord Holland). We've lived in Utrecht all of our lives and we've had it pretty damn good. Our houses in Nieuwegein and Utrecht (the city) were both comfortable and they suited our needs. And living in the city we always had the benefit of all kinds of shops and facilities nearby.

Now that I'm nearing my thirties and Dana's joined our family things look different though. We want to have a nice, big house that'll last us at least ten years (and possibly a second child). Since we'll be living off of my wages alone said house needs to be affordable, leaving us enough money for food, upkeep and savings. And since housing prices in the deep red provinces on the map suck we've decided to try our luck elsewhere.

Flevoland (the island in the middle) doesn't offer us much interesting because I particularly dislike the cities over there. Housing is a bit more affordable than elsewhere, but it doesn't help much that Almere is atrociously ugly :/ And since we've always like the countryside of Friesland and Drenthe, we've decided to move to the latter!

We've been browsing Funda for a few days now and even when limiting our search to the southwest of Drenthe there's more than two hundred houses to pick from! Houses within our budget that is... Right now we're eyeballing a house that's close to my in-laws, close to an Intercity railway station and close to both schools and a forest. It's about 130m2, has five rooms and two bathrooms. The kitchen looks alright, as do the two yards and the terrace. All of that rings in at around 190k, which is only 40k more than what we paid for our 80m2, first floor apartment.

Unfortunately there are a few downsides to living in Drenthe, the largest being the distance I need to travel for my daily commute. By moving further east I'm limiting the area that I can work in quite a bit. Quite severely actually, since most of the really big IT jobs are in the outmost west of the Netherlands. One could say that Amsterdam and Utrecht are about as far west as I could go to find jobs, while the west coast is my current limit. Oh well...

The other downside is that we'd be moving further away from all of our friends (except you Kaijuu, you'd be right around the corner!) and our family. But then again, the house'll be big enough to have a guest room, so hey! ^_^

It's a pretty big decision to make, but I do believe it's a good one.

Posted in: drenthe , house , moving

Some good news too: housing (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

While I'm waiting for tech support, I might as well cover the upside of things as well. As mentioned we spoke to our financial advisor last week about getting a new mortgage.

We're currently in the process of searching for a real house (as opposed to an apartment), which ought to be a lot nicer with Dana. We'd been looking in the 200k euro area which has some nice housing in Almere. We were very happy to hear from our advisor that the dutch .gov usually advices a limit of 230k on mortgages for people with my salary, so we were looking well within our budget. That's always good to hear.

We also spoke to a realtor about selling our apartment and his guestimates were also well within the budgetary window we'd been considering. So good on that as well!

Posted in: finance , good news , house , mortgage , moving

Let's play musical chairs! (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Due to a few administrative bork-ups at a higher level, it's been decided that my team at the office needs to move to another building. That's a real shame, because the building we've been in for years is absolutely wonderful. Not only in an architectural and culinary sense, but also in the sense that there's a lot of cool people over there.

Due to some more bork-ups in the delivery of the new/old building we were asked to temporarily move to yet another building. After a lot of hassle and moaning and groaning today's finally the day. We moved to a lovely art deco building in The Hague, whose interior faintly reminds me of my dad's office buildings from the early eighties :)

There's been some griping among the veterans who really, really wanted to stay at the old building. I understand where they're coming from, but personally I don't really mind. I go where the customer wants me to; that's what they pay me for anyway. And $DEITY knows where I'll be in a month or two ^_^

My new desk + chair suck though ;_; They're decrepit and falling apart.

Posted in: moving , musical chairs , office , switching , work

Interesting prospects: maybe in three years... (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

For the past few months we've been thinking about what we're going to do once I land that teacher's certificate. That's still three years away, but a little planning never hurt anyone.

One of the things we'd been pondering is to move away from the urbanised west of the Netherlands. Don't get me wrong, I really -love- living in Utrecht, but housing doesn't come cheap over there. Let alone in the bigger cities, like Rotterdam and Amsterdam. And at one point in time we will want to move to a bigger place. Again: I love our apartment, but wouldn't mind have a two, or three storey house.

Which is why Marli's been drooling over the Funda housing website since last night. She's been going over houses in Friesland (one of the Netherlands' rural area) and she's been falling in love :) For same amount of money that we paid for our 85m^2 apartment, we'll be able to afford a nice house with a garden! If that doesn't sound good, I don't know what does!

Thing is: in Friesland there's next-to-no call for ICT specialists at all. So we'll have to put off moving there for at least three years. And when you're already browsing through all these neat looking houses, that's not what you want to hear :)

Posted in: friesland , job , moving , prospect , teacher

I'm moving (chris@csoltis (cjs)) by Chris

I just decided yesterday; Landlord raised my rent again... every october, like clockwork. The little horn rimmed glasses man getting too greedy.

My neighbors are moving too, we just got two new sets of neighbors as well.. tenants in, tenants out.. its a revolution! People have to find new places to live eventually.

I don't want this to take more then a month so, I am going to start packing this weekend and put stuff into storage.

See you soon West LA!

Posted in: moving