Dreaming of a home of our own

On Saturday O and I found a dream apartment… in Brussels!

It had a small terrace overlooking the Park, 400 metres from a metro stop, including a garage (box fermé as it is called in Brussels), a small kitchen that needed refurbishing but already with a double-sink (Hallelujah!!), a huge living room with big windows in two directions and two bed rooms. We immediately tried to call friends in Brussels, could somebody help us check the place out? Maybe O’s brother could get a Ryanair ticket from Zaragoza to look at it…

This morning we found out that the place was already sold – of course! When things seem too good to be true, they usually are… Obviously somebody was quicker than us to react and scooped up a lovely apartment with lots of potential…

An empty kitchen just when I had moved in (2003). I shared the apartment with a French friend for a while before she moved upstairs to the attic flat just above (when she moved out, my boss moved in – upstairs, not with me, but that’s another story)

I got this outdoor set of table and chairs from a Spanish friend who was leaving Brussels when I needed furniture for the kitchen (my flatmate brought the old table with her when she left). Another Spanish friend broke one of the chairs, and I think O might have broken the other one… Spanish men are heavy!?

When O moved in with me, in early 2007, he made this extra counter space from two Ikea Bekväm tables and a spare counter top from the bargain corner.

The bed room just when I had moved in, 2003

My bed room in 2005 – with my cuddly seal called Umbrella on the bed!

While I continue searching for our future home in Brussels, a few things strike me:

• If apartment ads were half as staged as the Swedish ones, you could actually see how the place looks like instead of focusing on open cupboard doors, dirty laundry, unmade beds and other blurry images of the objects for sale
• Does anybody actually cook in Brussels? If the kitchens have been renovated in the last 30 years, it is with shoddy materials, no sense of practicality or planning…
• Can anybody work as a real estate agent in Belgium? There is a myriad of companies (and their photos don’t look a single bit more professional than those of the individuals who pose their ads on immoweb.be*) that don’t seem very professional or serious. Sometimes you will see the same apartment for sale by 4-5 different agents. Different angles on the photos but still all as bad…

Some of you might remember a similar, an equally ranting post about apartments in Spain… scarily almost exactly a year ago (28th August)! Scary, because we are in exactly the same situation as a year ago, not knowing too much about the future and I keep surfing the internet to look at apartments and dreaming of a home of our own…

An interesting looking tile job on the bathroom walls – compare with the kitchen wall.

Living room in 2003 – the red colour was really not by choice, I don’t even like red and prefer blue. However, the cheapest Beddinge sofa bed was sold in red, and then I found a cheap red and white rug… Later on I bought a white corduroy cover for the sofa and a white carpet, definitely more my style!

Dining room when I had bought a proper dining table! The same coat is in THREE of the photos and illustrate the lack of a place to hang coats by the front door. My father finally put up a few hooks behind the door in the dining room (see the photo below, the coats can be seen through the glass in the door).

The dining room later on became the living room… but I don’t seem to have any photos of that arrangement.

The photos are from my old apartment in Brussels – not staged and I would never try to sell an apartment with them! Obviously this was before my blogging days, as I have hardly any photos of my home without people in them. I was just thinking that it was a pity that I didn’t take photos of the rooms before we moved, it would have been nice to have as a memory, when I thought of my father’s photos (on a server that I can access remotely)… Every time my parents came to visit, my dear father seemed to have taken photos of my home! (some of them are mine though) 

This is the kind of photo people would post on the internet when trying to sell their home – you don’t see anything of the kitchen, just all the stuff… O and I had so much food and kitchen utensils, as you can see. Maybe that’s why I don’t have many photos of the last 8 months in the apartment – it was just too full of things and furniture when O had moved in!

*) The equivalent of hemnet.se in Sweden. A website to find houses and apartments for rent and sale in all of Belgium – both for real estate agents and individuals selling their homes without the “help” (??) of a professional.