Life in France: The new apartment

The new apartment is in a great location here in Chartres. It is about a 5 minute walk from the city center and is also close to the train station so I still only have a 5-10 minute walk to catch the train each day. We will also only be a 5 minute walk from family which makes it convenient to still see them often.

We had spent a month or so looking at apartments online and getting an idea of what was available. In France it is very common to find apartments through agencies and rare to rent them directly from owners. Therefore renting in France requires you to work with a realty agency and agent. Envision it being like buying a house in the states, including the agent getting commission for their work! A rough break down of costs is the typical 1 month deposit, 1st month rent and then additionally another payment equal to 1 month rent goes to the agency. Needless to say it's a decent chunk of change to just get into a new place.

A few weeks back we were alerted about an available apartment just a few blocks from where we have been living. James called and set up a time to go view the apartment and both of us were trying to stay open minded about it; telling ourselves that it was us just getting started on viewing apartments in person and not getting our hopes up that we could afford to move right now.

We viewed the apartment which had all of the basic requirements that we were looking for: 2 bedrooms, simple to modern layout, off street parking, and a nice kitchen that was already mainly set up (It is common here that you have to supply the entire kitchen, even when you are renting. This can literally mean that only the kitchen sink is supplied for you). The agent told us that if we were interested that we would need to get her all of the documents as soon as possible as she was showing the unit to 2 other parties after us on that same evening.

Like everything in France (from my experience) there is a lot of paperwork involved. This included copies of: work contracts, pay stubs (you are not approved to rent more than 1/3 of your income in France), ID's, letters of our last residence (renting or otherwise), and bank account information. They are not messing around in the rental world here!!! As some of you know I can sometimes be Type A, therefore immediately after the appointment I started filling out the forms and gathering the documents we needed. James was then able to drop them off to the agency the following morning and by late that afternoon he got a call from the agent telling him that the owners picked our file! Good news!

We met at the agency a little over a week ago. In addition to the agent being present for the paperwork the owners of the apartment were there as well. The paperwork was pretty extensive and we had to initial the bottom of every single page (seriously like buying a house in the states)!

As of today we have keys to our new home! We will try moving some small stuff over there during the week with the major move of things happening over the weekend. We are beyond excited to put down some roots for a bit, this transient life is exhausting and a lil short on space!

Here are some pics of the apartment that I took when we walked through it again this past weekend! Hopefully I will have some new pictures of us getting settled in soon!