Our quest paid of: we now have a new place to call home.
Well... not yet, we still have to move our stuff and get settled.
But at least we can start arranging all that right away: we signed the contract last week and are already renting this lovely early twentieth century ground floor apartment near the seaside since February 1st.
A little recap:
T and i lived in an apartment in Amsterdam that we knew was going to be demolished one day, however, all large city-planning projects around the country were put on hold, so we expected we'd be 'safe' for a while. We did up the temporary place in September to make room for BBboy Xam, who was born in November, and in December we heard that the revamp of our neighborhood was in fact going to happen soon and we'd have to leave our house in March.
Panic!!!
We launched a social media campaign trying to find an affordable and BB-suitable place to live, either in Amsterdam or in proximity of the city, for which we (ab)used our very photogenic son Xam (this post).
We posted the photo we took of him on our facebook-accounts and a lot of our friends shared it on to their friends who in turn shared it with their friends. All in all, we had a Lot of people keeping their eyes open for us, and got a Lot of good advice.
Also, we sent e-mails and letters (with the photograph) to all large housing corporations in Amsterdam, asking for help. We received a few 'we're sorry, we can't help you.' e-mails in return. Which was fine, we'd kind of expected that. A lot of corporations didn't get back to us at all.
One organization actually came up with a plan to help us if we would set up a community art project in return. We liked the idea, but the corporation couldn't guarantee us a house before March, and we eventually decided to instead go for a place outside of the city. By that time we already had several rental options outside Amsterdam and early last week we fell in love with a small house in Zandvoort, near the sea.
It all went pretty quick from there: we couldn't believe we would seriously move to the seaside. Our new landlord speeded up our decision making process by letting us know we could rent the house, but only if we'd sign the contract that same week. We saw a few other houses and went back to the place in Zandvoort one last time to be absolutely certain this would be the house we'd move out of the city for.
Last Wednesday we decided to go for it and rent the house.
T and i still can't really get our heads around it.
We'll be moving in less than two weeks, so we better start believing it... And start packing!
For all of you who helped us, either by sharing our photograph, talking to people, giving tips or just letting us know you were thinking about us: THANK YOU SO MUCH! It made us feel a lot less alone in our stressful quest.
