2022... the year of projects 🏡

🏡 Hi Friends :) 🏡

So Jérôme and I started this year kinda on a bad foot. We were supposed to have a flat in Juvisy sur Orge. Our flat. That we saw being built as it was new. That we thought we could start a family in.... But let's just say that it wasn't meant to be as things got bad with the owner... So we had to let go of this project.

To get us back on our feet, we decided to look for a house that will belong to us. That we will be the owners of.

But we didn't really know what was our budget or anything about "the steps of becoming an owner"

To make it short, we found in February a new real estate program in Boissise le Roi (77) called Les Villas d'Orgenoy and that was suiting the budget our bank advised us.

We were at first thrilled about this project and started visualizing ourselves in this future house. However, it was only a 2 bedrooms one, with no garage and only a small backyard. Also, it's a terraced house (on one side only as we are at the end of a line of houses)

As time went by and this project was becoming serious (we were about to ask for a loan to our bank and sign the paperwork)...

...In April, we decided to take a stand back and think. What was it that we really want?

Jérôme wanted a backyard to be able to grow our own veggies

I wanted at least 3 bedrooms (one for us, one for our first child and one to make my office as I work most of the week in home office) and 2 bathrooms (one upstairs and one downstairs).

At that moment, this real estate program was all that we could afford as a house....

But then...

...Right behind where we actually live, in Ballancourt, there is an empty field. That has been abandoned for over 10 years.

And just when we were about to conclude with the house at Boissise Le Roi, a new real estate program launched in this field.

The houses offered there are everything we were looking for:

- it's in our budget

- it has 3 bedrooms

- 2 bathrooms (one with a shower downstairs and one with a bath upstairs)

- a garage

- a large backyard (bigger than for the other house)

also, big bonus, it is in the list of cities we wanted to live in (because yes, Boissise Le Roi was outside our wished living zone) --> near our friends and family and close to school we know (I went to middle school and high school there)

actual plans of the house:

SO...in May, we decided to switch project and drop off the one with Les villas d'Orgenoy to start paperwork for our new program:

Le domaine de Saussay

Let's just say that we didn't thought that getting a loan will be that hard... Basically what happened is May 13th, we signed a reservation contract.

We had to wait for everything to be approved by the notary before starting to look for the loan.

Therefore, we only started to look at banks and gather all the requested documents in July.

We are now August 23rd and today, we got the news that our loan request has been approved!!! 😁😁 (after many plot twist with the bank)

some articles about why it's so hard to get a loan in France at the moment:

L’envol des taux d’intérêt des prêts immobiliers pourrait se maintenir en France

Immobilier : pourquoi près d’une demande de prêt sur deux est refusée en France

Immobilier : 45 % des prêts sont refusés à cause du taux d'usure, les professionnels s'inquiètent

We are currently (this week) filling in all the paperwork needed to finalize the loan demand. We just hope to be done before we go on holiday at the end of this week (September 2nd)

We are now very excited to sign the official notarial deed beginning of October, after our holidays.

Then we will be able to call this house officially ours