We don´t mess around

Well, when we have our minds set to do something, we don´t mess around. Less than 45 hours after touchdown at Flesland airport we bought our first home! It´s really spacious with two bedrooms and a dining room and takes up the entire top floor of a beautiful 1919 vintage building an easy walk from the city center. There´s a great kitchen, lots of natural light, and tons of storage space including an attic that is just asking to be converted into...well, we don´t know yet, but something neat. It´s big enough and central enough for us to be happy here for at least ten years. This was actually the place we´d had our eyes on (via the Internet) ever since it was first listed a week ago, and when we went to a showing the day after we arrived, we loved it and put in a bid. That admittedly low-ball bid had just seven minutes left before it expired at noon yesterday when the agent called: there had been a last-second bid, this one set to expire in just seven minutes. I guess he was hoping the agent wouldn´t be able to reach us in time for us to respond. We came right back and raised the bid. He then re-raised us, but we thought his choice of price indicated an upper bound, so we upped him back just enough to hit what we (rightly) thought was his limit and the place was ours. And if he´s reading this, a note for future reference: Don´t play numbers with me, jerkwad. I picked my new cell phone number today because it made the average of mine and Inki´s a nice even number. It´s just a bonus that except for 2 and 3 there´s only one prime factor less than 3347.
After the bidding was over (and it all only took an hour even with all that back-and-forth with the agent and the jerkwad, whom the agent admitted was an ass with all his last-minute bids and seven-minute offer expirations) we were very, very happy if emotionally drained. This was the place we wanted and we got it at a good price. After three and a half years of renting in San Francisco despite a combined income in six figures, we were ready to be homeowners. That´s what we were calling each other all day. "Hey, homeowner! Whadd´ya want for dinner?" "Homeowner, don´t forget the vet appointment is at 6:15." It was particularly sweet to know that our mortgage payments would be substantially less than the rent we paid in San Francisco, even given the current crappy exchange rate, to say nothing of the interest deduction on our taxes.
So we went over to the agent to talk financing and were really happy to hear that as first-time homebuyers in Norway we were entitled to the interest rate we´d get if we made a 40% down payment. That alone will save us somewhere around fifty thousand dollars over the life of the loan. And to top it off, the previous owner was willing to leave us his major appliances and his very nice furniture for about two hundred bucks rather than deal with getting rid of it. That really helps us because we have no 220V appliances and only enough furniture for our small SF apartment. We can move in as soon as the paperwork is taken care of, which will hopefully be in mid-August but certainly before our stuff arrives from the US. I think we skipped most all the way home from her office.
After taking the kitties to the vet for the last importation checkup, Andor and Inki and I cracked a bottle of champagne and walked up to our new home. Of course, we couldn`t get in without the key, but it was nice to just walk around the outside and look at the place. Our place.