Wow, does that sound weird! We bought a house in Amsterdam! As you can imagine it comes with all the “eeks,” “oohs,” “ahhs,” and “holy shits!” you can imagine! Buying a house in a foreign country is a little, shall we say, stressful, nerve-racking, fraughtful, taxing? Any number of anxiety ridden adjectives will do. But as goes with many things in life like this, the end result makes it very worth it.

We’ve been renting for a little over a year now and we absolutely love our neighborhood. Real estate really is all about location, and living where we do in Amsterdam has felt like home. We have loved our apartment but there’s not an option to buy it, so we knew it wouldn’t be a permanent home. We started slowly seeing what was out there.

Buying property in Europe comes with its own set of struggles. Inventory here tends to be much older than in the states. While this doesn’t come as a shock, it means we were faced with a potential renovation. We kicked that idea around a bit but the idea of having to live through a messy reno while not really speaking the language very well yet didn’t sound very appealing. Occasionally a fully renovated property hits the market and we decided we could wait for the perfect one.

After seeing a dozen houses with our makelaar (that’s Dutch for broker) we found one that we couldn’t stop thinking about. It’s completely re-done in every way, yet still in the original 1894 building. This meant not having to worry about a new foundation, new roof, windows, you name it. But it still maintains some of that original Dutch character that I love. It’s really pretty and checks nearly all the boxes for us. Fast forward a few weeks and we own it!

On the evening that we closed, we packed a picnic dinner and a bottle of champagne and walked over with Lola. Yes, I said walked! Our new house is just a couple blocks away! Lola scoped everything out and already felt comfortable enough to lounge on the new sofa (one of the few pieces of furniture already moved in). It was so easy to see all the new memories we will make there. 

Now for the fun part – moving! (said no one ever)… I’m really not looking forward to this next part but I know in the end we will be so glad we did this. We plan on making Amsterdam our home for a few years, improving our Dutch language skills, and being a bigger part of this amazing city. I’ll be sharing more on stories as we get settled, and I’ll have an updated post once we are all moved in. 

That’s the big news for now! Next up…our holiday in Provence! Stay tuned!

As always, thank you for reading! You can follow me on Instagram for daily updates on stories!

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xo – Erin

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