A House at Last....

Our new home: the first floor of this building

Well, a large apartment actually.  After 4 weeks of searching we signed a lease last week and moved in on Saturday.  Finding a place to live has been an interesting journey to say the least, and has given us a renewed appreciation of the term ‘Greek mansion’.  During our search, we’ve probably looked at more than 20 places, some of the highlights of which included:

• A place with 8 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms (not sure what the extra bathrooms are for??)
• A place that looked perfectly normal from the street, but when you walk in you realise that it contains a large swimming pool, sauna and recreation area underground beneath the house
• A house sitting right on the green line buffer zone, with attractive views of the mountains, a large Greek army base and the municipal prison (including an area cleared of all vegetation in case of a prison breakout)
• A large house beside a park that had been rented by a Russian family with a fullsize jacuzzi, steamroom and sauna in the granny flat out the back, as well as a giant safe strategically placed beneath the bathroom sink (useful for storing those excess Rubles and jewellery….)
• A house located near the centre of town with so many rooms that we figured we’d need to install some sort of radio tracking system to find the kids.  Would have been legendary for hide and seek

Suffice to say, these Cypriots know a thing or two about building, especially when the whole concept of doing something cheap in order to sell it on is foreign here.  Houses are seen as a multi-generational investment for a family, and therefore people generally don’t skimp on getting their houses right.

One of our dilemmas was that we wanted a swimming pool to keep the kids occupied through the long summer months, but also didn’t want to be too far out of town.  Even though the distances are not great, the daily traffic jam/s mean that proximity to school and work etc are important factors in deciding where to live.  As an example, the temporary place we have been living in is only about 5km from the school, but was a 50 minute bus ride home for the kids at the end of each day. 

The new pool (which will be enclosed!)

So anyway, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that it was either proximity or a pool, and every option we looked at seemed to be a tradeoff between these two.  That was until last Tuesday, when Alex (one of our erstwhile estate agents who would not look out of place in the film ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels), said that he had a ‘left field’ option we may be interested in.  Since he was the agent who had shown us some other more ‘exotic’ options, we rolled our eyes and wondered what he had for us this time, but decided to take a brief look anyway.  The property he showed us was a large four bedroom apartment occupying a full floor of a brand new building.  The property has been painstakingly built by a lovely Cypriot gentleman who collects antiques and spends his days polishing door handles and fine tuning his new, as-yet unrented building of three apartments.  The building is located about 2km from the school and town centre, has a great pool, is in a quiet part of town and also just across the road from a nice park.  Anyway, to cut a long story short we saw the pool first and crossed our fingers that the apartment would be liveable.  Sarah, realising that her two main criteria of a pool and proximity might be satisfied in this property, was on her absolute best behaviour and made no disparaging remarks about the large Greek flag tiled into the pool surrounds, the private museum that the owner has set up in the basement (which deprives us of parking), the small kitchen and bedrooms, the distinct lack of feng shui regarding the built-in wardrobes, and the abundance of family coats of arms on the gates, tiles and exterior or the building……I could go on.  However, the place also has many positive features, and the large open plan layout works well for us as family. 

The coat of arms that greets you at the entrance

After our inspection, some brief discussions ensued for the pointy end of cutting a deal, and we signed a lease the next day.  Moving across on Saturday is another story for another blog, but overall it’s great to have moved in.  The rest of our sea freight was supposed to arrive this week, but on last communication with the shipping agent is currently stuck at an undisclosed port in Italy which is closed due to poor weather.  Hopefully another week or so, and we’ll have our things. 

The view down to the pool from our verandah (railings to be installed this week!)