Dream Apparte

As part of my effort to get myself not bored, I took to looking in the classifieds for prospective apartments. One day I circled an ad for a two-bedroom apartment in the centre of town, but not really understanding the codes used for the number of bedrooms, facilities etc in real estate classifieds, I kind of forgot about it. One weekend we happened to walk past a real estate agent and went in to ask about the process for renting an apartment. We were told we had several alternatives. One would be to go directly through the owner in a private agreement. Another would be to go through an agent who organised everything and then added their fee to the monthly rent. The third option was to register with these guys for a fee and they would give us a list of places for rent that fit our requirements. They would then give us the details of places we were interested in and leave us to organise any meetings or viewings with the owner. It seemed that we would be paying this agent to be a source of information rather than a help in finding our dream apartment. We didn’t like the idea of paying someone to do what we could do ourselves for free so in the end we sat on our tails and stalled the apartment-finding process while we considered what to do.

A few days later Michael saw my circled advertisement and we tried to find it the next time we were walking in town. It was in a street called Rue Musette, which to our delight was the exact same street that had enchanted us on our first night in Dijon! We thought we should have a look before making a decision so we called the owner from where we thought the apartment was (there was no building number on the ad) and five minutes later we were being shown around. It was perfect! It had been redone only a year before so the paint was fresh and modern, and the bathroom was clean and, my favourite bathroom colour, blue! We were in love. It even had wooden floors - or so Michael thought – he only realised that it was lino about 3 weeks after moving in!

But we had a problem. The location and the price, although on the higher end of our budget, were right. But we’d said we’d have a look at another place that someone from uni had suggested, because they were moving out soon. We had our hearts set on Rue Musette and we didn’t want to miss out on it. But we also didn’t want to say yes in case the other place was better. I felt like we were little kids standing in front of the lolly counter at the corner shop, undecided about which lolly to choose for our lolly bag!

We were in a real bind and all we knew was that we had to act fast. So we organised a viewing of the other place and hoped that Rue Musette didn’t get snapped up in the meantime. You can guess what’s coming, can’t you? Yes, thank the lucky stars! The other place was a dump, I mean, totally unsuitable. Up several winding old staircases into the attic area of the building, it had a half size bedroom that wouldn’t fit a double bed in it and a second bedroom that had just enough room for the built-in bunks in it. The living area and kitchen were the only things going for it, although to get from there to the bedrooms you had to go back out into the stairwell and around the corner. I can’t even remember if there was a toilet or not! No, we’d found our dream home and no matter how great this attic apartment could have been, it would not change our minds. We called the owner of Rue Musette the next day and arranged to sign the contracts as soon as possible.

The following weekend we met with our future landlord, Mr Berthaud, at a café in the centre of town, right under Dijon’s very own Arc de Triomphe, actually called the Porte Guillaume. Here, we drank coffee and tried to decipher the terms and conditions of the contract. Luckily Mr Berthaud was friendly and helpful otherwise we could have been signing our lives away without knowing it!

Contracts signed, we started to feel a bit edgy, that we might have been too hasty in signing. We’d been told by some friends that it was hard to find good apartments in Dijon, that they had looked at up to 20 places before finally finding something acceptable. We were worried that we’d found something acceptable first time round and what if it was a mistake? So we asked Mr Berthaud if we could look again at the apartment just to be sure. Of course we knew all along that we’d been lucky when we found Rue Musette. It looked just the same as when we saw it the first time. And because we were new to the country/city/area, Mr Berthaud offered to take us on a tour of central Dijon! I bet there aren’t too many people out there who can say that their landlord took them on a tour of their town!