We're buying a house in Normandy!

          Yes, after tossing the idea around for over 2 years, we are in the process of buying a house in a village in Normandy.  We spent a week there last year (see the Normandy pages) and decided that we would like to return to vacation there on a regular basis.

          This year we contacted some realtors and viewed 8 properties. We both liked one of them the best, though all of them had delightful features.

          All of them had stairways and apparently I like to take pictures of stairways, so I have quite a few photos of the stairways in these houses.  For completely arbitrary reasons I am going to feature those stairways in this post.

 

Here's the first one we saw.  We saw several pink rooms and in this case it was the hallway that was painted pink.

 

This is the second floor landing of this house.

 

Many of the old stairways had been enclosed, or perhaps always were.

 

This house had been beautifully renovated downstairs, but they hadn't yet done the upstairs.

 

I think this is the only carpeted stairway we saw.

 

This is the front hall in the house with the stairway above.  I don't know why really, but I love this hallway.

 

Here's a modern stairway.  What was great about this one is that is was concealed behind a bookcase in the living room.  The bookcase appears in the photo below.

 

The right half of this bookcase folds back to reveal the stairway shown above, also a door to a bathroom.

And here's the one in the house we are buying.

Another photo of 'our' stairway taken from the 3rd floor looking down.

 

          Just a few notes on the buying process so far.  I don't know if this is going to be interesting or not.  After we got home and decided we did want to make an offer on this house, Jim e-mailed the agent and after about 2 days of wondering, she called.  We made an offer , which she communicated to the buyer and which we heard  two days later was accepted. We were sent a multi-page document by e-mail, which we printed at my sister-in-law's, because we were there for a wedding. We signed all pages of several documents, including an inspection of the house.  We returned the signed documents by mail. This is called a "compromis de vente" or "promise to buy."  We await instructions on the next step. Jim has done a lot of research on-line regarding purchasing property in France, and on the most economical way to transfer large funds.  We expect to go over in September to close the deal and take possession of the house.