House 6. Mellangårdsvägen. Removed from our list already during our pre-check (a few days before the viewing) when we saw that the house was close to a main road and a busy crossing. No buy.

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 3. Torulfsgatan. Not too bad on the inside, but from the outside this was an ugly house in a street with 10 more identical ugly houses. Gives the owner all the disadvantages of a terraced house but at the price of a detached house. 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 1. Byvägen. Large house on a split plot*. Long and narrow house, so we called it “the loaf”. Garden too small, house too dark, with too many small rooms (which is good for a large family but not much use to us), and the whole thing felt a bit cheap. 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.

1. Going through the box of clothes that I put aside (because they didn’t fit my new shape) when I went back to work 6 months after Ingrid was born, and discovering that they now mostly fit again. It’s like buying a whole new wardrobe but a lot cheaper, and with far less hassle.
2. Finding a jar of vanilla sugar in the kitchen cupboard, with a “best before” date in late 1996.

We have two big projects right now: I need to find a job, and we need to find a house. Every Sunday is househunting day: we take the tube to Spånga and go to all the viewings we can, as long as they seem even remotely interesting. In fact when we have time we also view houses that we don’t expect to be interested in at all, just to see what’s out there, and to educate ourselves.

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!

Well before moving we decided that it would be nice to have a house with a bit of a garden. But it’s hard (as well as risky and expensive) to buy a house from a distance. So we moved in to a borrowed apartment and will stay here while we look for a permanent home. As soon as we arrived in Stockholm, we started looking for one.

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.

For those of you who have not moved from London to Stockholm in early spring (because in Stockholm, late March is definitely still only early spring), here are some first impressions.

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.

We’ve landed. We have a flat, and it has furniture, and we have food and internet. The boxes and furniture are in transit and expected to arrive on Wednesday.

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.

This is it – the computer will now be taken apart and packed away. No more blog posts until we have landed and either unpacked the computer, or found one to borrow.

Learnt from this packing experience: You will underestimate. Get a good deal more than you think you will need, of everything.

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.