Chronicle of departure : D-300
As I mentionned previously, we are about to leave France and settle down in the US, this time permanently. We will live in a university town in a State on the East Coast.
Today we have up to 300 days to spend in France before my husband starts to work there in August 2017 7th and our children start school there again (I don’t know the exact time of back-to-school in our futur hometown but I know it’s around the beginning of August).
I have decided to write regularly on this blog about different issues dealing with this « big departure », which will obviously confront us with differences and similarities between France and the US. Today is our D-300.
Today’s issues
Today’s issues are about housingin our future hometown and here in Lille before we leave. We presently rent a house in Lille (since we came back in Lille in 2015). When my husband had his last interviews in March, his future employer set up an appointment with a realtor who discussed with him the housing market there. We contacted the realtor a few days ago by Skype and talked about different possibilities.
It turns out that the renting market is pretty small there and our best choice would be to buy a house. He opened an « account » for us on his website to let us look at different houses now available on the market, even if we won’t buy before a few months.
We showed the realtor « portal » to our children who were pretty much excited by the houses, which is good because we want them to be excited and participate to the process. My oldest son (11) decided to compare these houses (even if we explained them clearly that the houses we saw won’t be on the market when we will decide to buy) and started an Excel worksheet with several columns to compare them… I must say that my husband and I are pretty glad he started it because it will help us to grasp different possibilities on the market. One difficult point is that I have never been in that town (we didn’t have neither enough time nor enough money to « waste » to make a family travel there before he accepted the job offer). And we don’t know which neighborhoods are best for us. In fact my husband has already asked several questions to his future colleagues and we asked questions to the realtor. But it turns out there are different quality neighborhoods and the best one would really depend on our personal and subjective criterias.
The 2nd question for us is about our moving and the best time to move. After more than 15 years living together and several movings we have accumulated a lot of furniture and stuff we appreciate. We will have to make a choice and sell or donate some of them that don’t work for us anymore but we will take a great part of them with us. Moving between France and the US will be a big issue and will be probably quite exhausting. And we know that moving our furniture by sea will take at least 3 months.
The big question is: should we send our furnitures 3 months ahead our travel and live meanwhile in a furnished appartment (or any other solution) or should we pack our stuff right before our travel and live in the US in a temporary solution for 3 months? We need to clarify this as soon as possible because it will determine the date of our moving and the date before when a lot of chores should be done.
Our state of mind today
Our state of mind is good. Our kids don’t really think about departure yet (even if they know we’ll move) but my husband and I think about it several times a week. I feel quite excited : ). We planned for this departure and it actually will happen ! I’m just a little bit stressed out today as I realized we had « only » 300 days left before we start a new life there in our future hometown !
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