Apartment hunting in Stockholm: weekend warriors

We’ve spent our weekend looking for apartments again. It’s become our all-consuming search. During the week and on Saturdays, we troll the listings in the newspapers, marking which ones look interesting. Then we go on the real estate sites to look at the photos and floor plans and all the other pertinent details. If the place still looks good, we see what time the visnings or showings are on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening and mark out our line-up. I’ve honed my skills and have developed quite the process for how all this comes together.

Today we looked at four places in an area of Mariatorget that Robert and I have come to love. This is the second time for me to look at one of the places, so it is a distinct possibility. And for fun and moral support today, our friends MB and Rich joined us in the search. It made it kind of like a party.

By the way, we went yesterday to see the building in Hammarby where we were offered a second-hand lease but could not see because the building is still under construction. This is a brand-new area and a brand-new building, but it’s just outside the city and has become sort of a yuppie baby central. Without kids, we feel like two fish out of water there. But we thought we would give it a chance.

In studying the building, we identified which place could be ours. On the floor plan, there was something marked as a konstverksfönster or art window. Now that could be cool, we thought. Until we saw it: on each floor, there was a different stage of courtship cut out of the concrete facade. The fifth floor had a man giving a woman flowers, the next floor down showed the man and woman dining at a table with a heart over them, the next showed them embracing, the next showed the woman with a baby bump and the final showed the man changing a diaper. And that’s when we knew that we simply did not belong there. On to the next place!

Tagged as: An American living in Stockholm, searching for an apartment