So, me and my girlfriend have been house-hunting for a couple of months now and have finally signed a contract to rent one. The place we've found is honestly quite a steal, in terms of rent & space. We're paying around 600 euros per month for the house you see in the picture, which is a one bedroom, with decently sized living-room and kitchen. On top of that, we also get 4 separate storage areas.
Now, if that was the only thing we were getting, it would be great, but it's not all. This little house sits right next to a castle and we get private access to all domains around it, in total over 4 hectares and a private tennis court. We share this area with the other people who live here, 3 families in total.
In the picture above, you can see the castle, which is adjacent to our house. The owners are a sweet French-speaking elderly couple, who rent out a couple of rooms in there castle and two houses right next to it. All the buildings are registered as monuments, so they can't make any changes to the outside. That's why the buildings are quite old-fashioned. The interior is also pretty simple, but we have all necessary amenities.
Yesterday we started re-painting the interior and I've also set up a little vegetable garden right in front of the house. You can see a couple of tomato plants and some herbs.
Indoors there was quite a bit of work to be done, the former renter clearly smoked indoors, so we have to re-paint everything. No other way to get that nasty smell out & those stains off the walls. Luckily the owners provided us with the paint and some cash to do the work.
The living area still needs to get done, we started out with the bedroom. I mean, the surface of the house itself isn't that large, but the real value comes with access to the lands around it. The kitchen is far from modern, but it's definitely enough for what we need. My girlfriend is fresh out of college and I've just started a business, so saving up on rent is perfect for us. Especially since we're getting such great value with all the additional land we can use.
Speaking about all that additional land, it's a really big domain. I tried walking across the entire domain and wasn't able to get to the end before turning back. That already took me almost half an hour. There's this huge pond with a little bridge, which would be a great fishing spot. Though I reckon I can't really go fishing there, I might ask the owners about it after we've fully moved in.
Then there's the tennis court, I don't play tennis, but I might just try to play a bit in my spare time now.
There's one other thing I discovered when wandering around the domain, but I think this warrants a second post. I've found a small little 'village' of to-scale historical buildings that were built to use as play-houses for the owners' children. These small houses were built in the 40's and 50's and were pretty neat to see.
I'll give you a little preview below, but will go more in depth in one of my next posts ;-)
So, we're incredibly happy that we managed to find this place. We'd been scouring all the real-estate websites for months, even tried to rent a few other places but got rejected because we weren't fast enough. Now we're incredibly happy that we found this place.
In terms of price, I don't think we could have done better than this, it's quite steal here in Belgium. Similar places could easily go for 700 - 1000 euros per month, I'm 100% sure of that. I hope you've enjoyed reading this post and looking at all the pictures. It's been a while since I've written an in-depth personal post like this ;)