Moving Day in August

With our move today into our new apartment, we entered another phase in our Swedish adventure.  We are now firmly ensconced in a real Swedish apartment.  Our initial seven-week rental of a 103 square meter, 3-bedroom apartment overlooking a beautiful park was not typical for this space-starved city.   For the next nine weeks, we are in cityscape 37 square meter, 1-bedroom apartment with pedestrian and vehicular traffic on Torkel Knutssonsgatan constantly passing our kitchen window.   Now this is Stockholm.

We actually feel quite lucky to have secured this new apartment on Brännkyrkagatan in Södermalm. Housing is in short supply in Stockholm, and has been for a century. When this apartment appeared on one of the many websites Helen monitored, she immediately sent an email of interest.   Her email was one of the first of 50 responses our new landlord received the first day.  We interviewed and closed the deal.

We think being old enough to be our new landlord’s parents helped our case.  Helen had learned in responding to apartment openings to include that we were a mature couple, on two-year contracted work assignment from the US and that we were non-smokers, and had no children or pets. 

The apartment’s attraction was that it met many of our criteria.  Most importantly, the weekly rental enabled us to perfectly bridge the “housing gap” we had until moving into our one-year long leased apartment in mid-October.  The apartment is also a 3-minute walk to the T-Bana (subway) and there are two supermarkets on the walk to the subway.  As we grow more accustomed to a car-free urban lifestyle, calculating distances to transportation and markets is now part of our lives. 

The actual move was painless.  Helen had packed a number of items earlier in the week.  On Saturday, we finished most of the packing and then took an evening break and watched an iTunes downloaded movie.  Early Sunday morning we stripped the beds and washed linens and towels. Final items were packed and we hopped the T-Bana, each of us pulling two suitcases, for the first of two trips to relocate our belongings.

Adriane, our new landlord, greeted us at the apartment.  We exchanged the first month’s rent for two sets of keys.  We then wished one another good luck and parted ways.  Adriane is vacating her apartment to move in with her boyfriend.  She may be on a grander adventure than we are.

As we left our old apartment for the last time we placed a bottle of wine on the kitchen table to thank our former young landlords for “the use of the hall.”  Johan and Asa are also our children’s age and are raising two small children.  They are indeed on a grand adventure.

We unpacked at our new apartment, made a grocery run, had lunch and declared that we had had another wonderful day in Sweden.