At the same time I feel like I’m on vacation. I’ve never lived in a house before, and I associate houses (and especially gardens) with the long summers of my childhood, at my grandmother’s summer house. The noises in the neighbourhood – dogs barking, children playing, chainsaws roaring – also remind me of those times. I have this vague feeling that soon it will be autumn and I will have to go back to the city and back to school.

The comfortable feeling is partly because I am taking the move from a two-room apartment to a 4-room house in small steps, easing myself into this new place. We’re only occupying the ground floor now – the stairs to the first floor are blocked off because we don’t want Ingrid climbing them before we get a banister in place. And while I love the feeling of a garden around the house, I have been enjoying it from a slight distance: from the kitchen window or the veranda. Actually walking or sitting in the garden feels weird. It doesn’t feel like mine yet.

It took a bit longer for Ingrid to be comfortable with the move. She didn’t like the move itself at all: strange place, strange people, strange doings, and nobody was paying much attention to her. The disruption led to a few days of clinginess and a few nights of broken sleep. But I think she’s also more or less settled in here now. She calls the house “home” already, and comfortably finds her way around, even early in the morning when she wakes up and comes searching for me in the bathroom and the kitchen.

I am really not looking forward to another move, but I am very much looking forward to moving into a permanent home. While it was very convenient to have a landing place for these 3 months, and to not have to unpack all our stuff, it felt like living in limbo. Most things remained packed away, including much of our furniture, almost all our kitchen equipment, all our books, etc etc. Everything was temporary. “It’s only for one more month, it’s not worth digging through everything to find X. We’ll manage without.” Or “Let’s just buy a new one.” It didn’t feel like a home, and frankly it was also just too cramped for the three of us. I felt a constant low-level tension because of this, and it will be very good to be rid of this feeling.

We were slightly over-optimistic in our estimate of the speed of getting a new internet connection (= too late ordering one) so there will be a gap during which we will have no internet at home. If we find an open WiFi connection, we may get online anyway; otherwise I’ll have to make do with what I get at work. So posting may be light for the next 10 days or so.

Here it is: the House.

The house is from 1906. It is yellow and clad in wood panelling and has a gambrel roof.

It has a leafy garden, a veranda at the rear and a small patio at the front.

The agreement was signed on Friday. Tomorrow we’re having a surveyor inspect it. As long as the survey doesn’t uncover any major surprises, we’ll be transferring the down payment on Monday, then spending a few weeks organising a loan and other paperworks, and moving in by July 1st. All very exciting.

I’m not looking forward to moving again, but I am looking forward to moving into our new house, if you see what I mean.

PS: Whenever I hear the word “homeowner” I hear the voice of Dr. Zoidberg… Look at me! I’m Dr. Zoidberg, homeowner!

House 15. Skogsbacken. The viewing for this one is really next week, but the house was already empty, so we got a sneak preview. Big garden, totally empty: it looked like it had been an overgrown jungle that had just been cut down completely, leaving nothing. Lots of potential but lots of work, too. Newly renovated house in great shape. But the house felt small: low ceilings, small kitchen, small bathroom, small hallway. Not too bad but not very inspiring either.

Two weeks were lost to Valborg. All real estate agents sensibly assumed that, since the 1st of May fell on a Thursday, most people would take Friday off and be out of town for the entire 4-day weekend. Therefore no point in having viewings that Sunday. And of course if people are away, they’re unlikely to be bidding on a house, so there were no viewings the weekend before Valborg, either.

This week there was one house for sale in the area we’re interested in. It is built on such a slope that the garden would be unsuitable for anything except sledding or cheese rolling, and you’d need a safety barrier at the bottom of the slope because there’s a road there. We didn’t go to the viewing.

However some promising houses have popped up for next week so there will be more action soon again.

House 11. Norrgårdsvägen. “Subsidence damage and need for renovation” turned out to mean big cracks in pillars and walls, and floors slanting so much that you could feel it when walking around in the house. Estimated cost for straightening up and stabilising the foundation: SEK 500,000. No buy.

House 12. Skogsbacken. Excellent location (quiet street, 10 minutes’ walk from the station), relatively large garden, and the house itself was quite nice, too, except for the 1970s interiors (“some need for modernisation”). Not quite the light, open interior we were looking for, but it could probably get quite close if we knocked down a wall, made one window three times larger, and tore down the large dark roof over the terrace. The first house we’re actually interested in!

House 13. Solhagavägen. Reasonable in all ways, but not really exciting. We would probably have been tentatively interested if we hadn’t seen Skogsbacken. This one is in great state and needs no modernisation, but on the other hand it is twice as far from the station, and has a noticeably smaller garden. No buy.

Before we got to Sweden, I was fully prepared for several months of job hunting. There might be no relevant openings, or I might not like them, or they might not like me. In the end it took no more than two weeks. We appear to have arrived right at the top of the business cycle for the IT industry: every firm is clamoring for more staff, and employees can afford to pick and choose.

Monday two weeks ago I searched through Monster and picked out 8 ads that seemed relevant and/or interesting. I also sent my CV to the IT departments of a few large banks. On Tuesday, the day after, I got replies to a few of my letters, and more followed the day after. 10 days later I had already met 5 companies, some of them more than once.

My initial plan was to aim for the finance/IT intersection: banks, other financial institutions, firms writing financial software, perhaps even IT consultancies focusing on the finance industry. And yet I chose the one firm I met that has no links to the financial industry. They seemed like more fun than any of the others, frankly. I also feel that I don’t necessarily want to narrow my career to “IT within finance”. I would rather broaden my experience than focus it. For that same reason I am also not continuing with Winforms or Office integration, but sailing off into unknown waters: web development (with ASP.NET).

So I will be developing software that will help other people develop even more software. That feels strange in a way: kind of circular. But at the same time I am keenly aware of the importance of good dev tools (as my previous colleagues can attest!) and good tools give me warm fuzzy feelings. The world needs more good tools, there can never be enough.

House 7. Norra vägen. Nice inside, but the plot of land was small, and the whole area felt badly planned: the neighbouring houses were too many and too close. The view from the bedroom window was right onto someone else’s wall, and when we went to the back garden and I imagined myself sitting there in the sun in the summer, I also had to imagine 7 other households staring at me. No buy.

House 8. Solhemsbackarna. A terraced house, but the last one in a row, and right next to a commons. Looked good on the internet but in real life the interior felt small and the ceiling a bit low. Plus of course the area was full of dozens upon dozens of exact copies of the house. It was half the price of a detached house, but it really would have felt like a budget option, and we’re not that anxious to save money on this purchase. No buy.

House 4. Båtsman Nähls väg. Garden too small, and the inside of the house was nothing spectacular. No buy.

House 5. Stackvägen. Another split plot, where the access road must have taken up a third of the plot, the house another third, which left a narrow strip of land on each side of the building as “garden”. On the inside the house was beautiful – just the kind of open plan house we’d been looking for, plus it was in very good shape, shiny new. We were really sorry to see such a lovely house on such a tiny plot of land. No buy.

House 2. Frälsegränd. Average on all counts. Did not stand out as either good or bad, except for the location, which was far from both bus and train. No buy. Snapped up by someone else within about a week.

A split plot (avstyckad tomt) is a plot that has been created by cutting up a larger plot. Someone has a house with a large garden and decides to chop their garden in two and sell the other half. Often one of the plots is behind the other one, not adjacent to the street (rather than the two being side by side), so an extra strip of land is cut off from the front plot for an access road to the rear plot.

What are we looking for?

• Location: Northwest Stockholm, at a distance that’s convenient for commuting. Spånga is the area we’re focusing on, because it’s a nice area, and not as expensive as some other nice areas in NW Stockholm. It also has good communications in to the city centre.
• Open plan, or something that can be converted to an open plan through judicious tearing down of walls. We loved our last flat in London, which consisted of one small bedroom and one huge everything-else room, with a high ceiling, exposed brick walls and exposed beams. If we could have taken it with us to Stockholm, we would have. We want something similar here. We want a house where it is natural for the entire family to spend time together in one large area, so that whoever is cooking dinner in the kitchen can hear the music that the others are listening to in the living room, hear their comments on what they’re doing on the computer, etc.
• Lots of light, lots of space. High ceilings.
• About 3 bedrooms.
• A house. Ideally a detached house, but a good terraced house might be interesting, too. No flats, though. This is because we also want…
• A decent-sized garden/yard. It should have enough space for children to run around and play, for some flowerbeds and berry bushes, and perhaps for a small kitchen garden.
• We don’t care very much about the current state of the house (as long as there are no structural problems). Ugly 1970s wallpaper, worn-looking bathrooms, old fridge/freezer/washer – all that can be fixed later.

Swedish real estate agents have a shared database that lists all houses for sale via an agent, in all of Sweden. This database is freely available on the internet, with photos, maps, viewing times, floor plans etc. We keep track of everything that’s put up for sale in Spåga.

I’ve created a del.icio.us account where I will be saving all the houses that we consider even remotely interesting. They’re tagged by viewing date – this weekend’s viewings, for example, are tagged houses+20080413. Feel free to take a look and send us your views on what you see!

The Swedish market for houses is quite well-organised and efficient. Perhaps your pre-conceived notions about Sweden involve a belief that all of Sweden is efficient? It isn’t. The rental market is notoriously inefficient, with rent controls, decade-long queues, payments under the table etc. But luckily we are not looking for a flat to rent.

The process is generally straightforward and open. As far as I understand, it normally goes like this: The owner contacts a real estate agent. The building is advertised for sale. They arrange for two open viewing sessions: one normally on a Sunday, and the other one on a weekday evening during the following week. Potential buyers turn up on the Sunday, look at the house and talk to the agent. If they like what they see, they come back for the second viewing, this time bringing their family, friends and relatives for second and third opinions.

Buyers then start bidding. The bidding is normally open: each buyer’s bid is relayed to the seller as well as to all other buyers, who can then overbid them. The seller has the right to accept any bid, not necessarily the highest one, so the process can be finished even though people are willing to bid more.

When the seller accepts a bid, the seller and buyer sign a contract, and the buyer pays a down payment (about 10% of the price) to the agent. The time from viewing to signing can be over in a few days. While a quick process is convenient for the seller, it means that buyers have to make up their minds very quickly. You cannot go back and forth between two houses to compare them. You see the house once, maybe twice, and that’s it. Because of this, interested buyers start viewing houses well before they actually decide to buy, in order to get an overview of what’s available.

The upside of a quick sale process is that there is no nastiness like the English phenomenon of gazumping. This works because the sale is “subject to survey”: after signing, the buyer engages a surveyor who surveys the house. The agreement normally gives the buyer the right to cancel the deal if the surveyor finds something unexpectedly nasty.

If everything is OK the sale is formalised and registered, the full sum is paid, and the keys are handed over. There is also a 1.5% stamp duty to be paid.

Financing is normally arranged in advance of buying. The buyer gets a free “loan promise” from a lender, for a given sum, meaning that the lender promises to lend that sum to them. A promise like that is required in order to participate in the bidding process.

See also Buying a Swedish apartment: an auction by SMS and Getting a Swedish mortgage.

Stockholm looks deserted. Compared to London, there is a lot of space and few people. Even 11 o’clock on a Saturday morning, the roads were almost empty in the middle of town and there were hardly any people in the streets.

Stockholm is also visually quiet. London is an incredibly busy place, with a very high information density. A lot of people, vehicles, and movement, but also a lot of visual input – signs, details on houses, shop windows etc. In Sweden the architecture is more restrained, the shop windows less in-your-face, and the street signs all standardised.

The grass is brown and not green. In London grass remains green all year round, because winter doesn’t get particularly cold. In Sweden, grass dies during winter and then fresh grass comes up in the spring.

The air is dry. I can feel my skin shrivelling and wrinkling. At the same time it means that the air does not feel as cold as it would in London. 7°C in London is raw, wet and cold; the same temperature here feels quite mild. I used to put this down to habit, to getting used to the weather, but I doubt that that would happen overnight.

There is gravel on the pavement everywhere. Gravel that gets stuck in the grooves of shoe soles, and on the wheels of the suitcase, and then sneaks into your home and onto your wooden floors if you’re not careful.

It still feels weird to be here, and the move still feels a bit unreal. It feels like we’re on vacation, like we should be going home soon again.

The one thing that makes this definitely different from a vacation was that we did not need to worry much about what to pack. There was no risk that we would forget to pack something important, because by the time we left, the only things left in the flat were some cleaning supplies, some money for the cleaner, a few spare lightbulbs, and instruction manuals for appliances like the cooker and the washing machine.

Tomorrow we will start house hunting. On Monday we will visit the tax office and let the Swedish government know that the country has three new residents, including one new citizen.

We ordered new boxes for books, and thought we had bought way more than we could possibly need. They’re all full now. We brought out all the boxes from our previous move, and thought the same – there’s no chance we will fill those. Guess what – we did. We thought we’d need a day, and now we’ve been busy for three.

Packing is more pleasant when you don’t have to worry about running out of time. We could have squeezed most of the work into one very long day, and cut corners: quickly stuff things in a box, instead of wrapping and putting them down one by one. Now we’ve been able to go out for lunch every day, and spend time in the evenings doing other things.

The same goes for packing materials. We have enough resealable plastic bags to last us through this move and probably five more. And it’s nice. There is no need to stop and think, “Can I put this in a bag, or will we need them for something else?” There is no hesitation. We can put each rolled-up cable in a bag of its own, as well as each bottle from the bathroom, and each widget and doodad from our desk drawers.

Done:

• Packed all books (20 boxes) and CDs (3 boxes) and DVDs, comics etc
• Disassembled bookshelves
• Emptied attic of camping gear, summer clothes, diving gear etc, and repacked all that
• Packed all plants and most toys
• Emptied most drawers (of clothes, tools, and office supplies)
• Disassembled our bed and Ingrid’s cot

Still to be done:

• Pack remaining clothes
• Pack away our computers

… plus all sorts of odds and ends that will probably grow like a hydra, chop off one head and two new will grow in its place. But we’ve got all day tomorrow to finish (the movers arrive early Friday morning) so it shouldn’t be a problem.