It's Official!

We are now the proud renters of our 6th home in less than 11 months - we signed the lease on our house today! It was wonderful to be back at the house that we chose in Chatou. Samuel became very excited when he saw the pool and was crawling and walking all over the house and outside terrasse. He was particularly keen on exploring the stairs, so baby gates will be one of the first things we need to install.

We met the owner of the house today, who seemed like a very nice man and who also spoke English well. He is letting us keep an old fridge/freezer and 3 portable air conditioning units in the house (great news... particularly with the hot weather we have already started to have) as well as a child's tent with many little plastic balls that Samuel is very excited with. The house is really wonderful - calm, peaceful, beautiful garden and view, quite warm and full of light inside and in extremely good condition. We can't wait to move.

P&G have extremely graciously agreed to foot a significant amount of the bill for our move. We now need to negotiate our way out of our current lease to reduce the notice period and to negotiate low estimates from moving companies. That will be fun for the rest of this week. Oh... and buying a cheap 2nd car, since we will now be suburbanites (the nearest RER station is a 15 min walk). Dave will now have to drive in France!

The imperative to move became even more apparent this weekend. Not only do we have 15 individual rooms rented out above our heads, with no soundproofing at all between us, with the communal showers almost immediately above our bedroom and much of this done in blatant violation of the law (on the basis that it will take years in France to resolve this in court). In addition, in the span of the last 3 weeks, we have seen a plumber (neighbours had a leak due to poor quality plumbing work done for the illegal construction above), the police (burglary in the basement due to front doors left open all the time), and now the firemen as this weekend we smelt a very strong odor of burning paint - quite scary - and had to call the firemen to check it out as it seemed linked to the work done on the rooms above. All this in addition to the fact that the elevator will be out of service for 5 weeks (minimum!!) starting next week.

So..... we plan to move starting on June 8th! And we look forward to welcoming you to our new home. We don't intend to move again for quite a while... at least a year or two :-)

-Julia