We're outta here - good bye Bologna

We accepted an offer for our apartment last evening. We are very happy! We had spent the afternoon at the house in Scascoli (my flavor of the month) and then after receiving the offer took a drive out there to see the property in the full-moon light. This is the house I really want and it is a 30 minute drive to Bologna and so would not be a drastic change of life for us (the little white door you see above the light fixture is where a small statue of the Madonna is supposed to sit - we will have to go to a convent shop to buy one).

I hope we can make an offer on Monday that is acceptable as real estate in Italy is quite different than in the US. First, if you are looking to buy a house, you have to contact the listing agent as there is no such thing as multiple listings. So you meet a lot of agents and some are good, some are great and some are a disaster. As a seller, you only have one agent that shows your house, and we used a professional gentleman that we bought and sold from twice before. But now we have to deal with someone new for the place we want. The hitch is, you can set the closing date any time and waiting 12 months for one is quite common. So our buyer wants up to a year to close on our place. Now we just have to get the seller of the house we want to agree to that, with the hope that it comes much sooner. But we know he wants to buy a new place and will be less than happy with such an agreement.

So the flavor this month is an old farm house with an attached barn that has been converted into a loft space. There is a nice old, part with small rooms and old, wavey brick floors, a guest room and three baths, all redone very nicely and even combining old ceiling beams with steel ones. The barn has been converted to a loft and dining area - a funky layout with a nice combination of old and new. The exterior still needs to be done and we would have to put in a terrace and plant the 2000 meter garden. The house is a bi-familiare and so attached in the back to another residence. We met those owners yesterday - a retired couple who use the house only for the summer. The village itself (and this is where Andrea hesitates) is small - perhaps 100 residents, and not even a coffee bar in sight. But the bread man comes with his wagon (er, van) every day so at least we know we can get some fresh rolls if we don't want to drive out of town for food. This Sunday is the chestnut festival that we attended exactly one year ago and posted on my blog - who'd have thought we would have come around to actually wanting to live in a place where we once went to for the quaint break in the countryside.