Third time is a charm
Surely it can’t be this easy?
I know, I know! We’ve been here twice before already. Experience has taught us two valuable things. First, patience is a virtue, and refreshing your inbox every 210 seconds is entirely futile—you are much better off numbing your mind with Netflix or knitting a very anxious pair of socks. Second, experience has taught us that everything usually goes wrong. Our excitement was naturally seasoned with a healthy dose of dread.
Then, a mere twelve hours after submitting our offer, the estate agent’s name popped up in our inbox. We stared at the unopened email like it was a live explosive, took a collective deep breath, and clicked.
The owner had accepted. First offer. No counters, no weird stipulations, no mind games. Just a single offre d’achat to sign, and the house was theoretically ours. It felt suspiciously easy.
Determined not to repeat past heartbreaks, we had already primed our mortgage broker before the viewing trip. He had wished us a cheerful “Bonne Chance” and told us to call him when we had something concrete. Well, it was now. We fired over the listing and the signed offer. An hour later, he replied with a date for an online chat and a checklist of required documents.
This checklist was roughly the length of an ALDI receipt. Every single piece of paper required digital scanning and uploading: IDs, proof of address, every penny earned, every penny spent, and apparently a pint of blood. If a document existed in our lives, they wanted it. (I’ll be writing a separate survival guide for this bureaucratic nightmare later).
A few days later, we logged into our online meeting to dissect the timeline. It was mid-December, and we were told to realistically look at late April for completion. French bureaucracy does not rush for anyone, least of all eager house buyers. Still, as we headed into Christmas, we were dangerously full of hope. After ten years of dreaming, it felt like the universe might actually let us win this one.
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