Our new house in The Hague

Earlier I had written about the mortgage for our new home in The Hague, but now I shall write about the house itself. I think we got lucky in our search for a new home. The house had just been placed on Funda (the most popular Dutch website for advertising real estate) for a few days when we visited it. We had to hurry because others were about to visit and place bids as well. Shortly after our inspection we were convinced and placed our bid. After a short negotiation we reached an agreement on the same day. In June we moved in.

Because I consider it important that no one can determine my address from my blog, I won’t be very specific in my description of our home. It’s a single family home from the eighties with two floors. It’s located in the district of Loosduinen, a former village in the southwest of the municipality of The Hague. This is the good part of the city, which is further away from the center. It doesn’t feature much dense construction with high-rise buildings. It’s relatively green, opposite our front door there are no other homes but a nice row of tall trees. A great location if you consider that it’s an urban environment.

The house has a very small front garden and back garden which measures 70 square meters. The previous inhabitants filled it with tasteless pavers, except for two borders with plants near the fence. They probably thought that an actual garden would take too much work or cost to much (hint: neither are true). We do appreciate the beauty of nature. That’s why we removed most of the pavers from the front garden near the end of the summer. After we dug out a large amount of sand we filled it with garden earth and planted a row of boxes and a rhododendron, both evergreens. The back garden will be done in the spring of 2017. We will replace half of the pavers with grass.

The interior of the house had already been improved by the last inhabitants. We didn’t need to do anything, except for a small paint job. The kitchen is just a year or two old and looks good, same for the bathroom. The only thing I’d like to add are reproductions of paintings and photos to decorate the walls.

There are also some disadvantages. We have an air heating system instead of water heating. Good thing that we don’t see radiators, but it’s less efficient than water heating. I knew so at the moment we decided to buy the house, but it was not a critical issue for me. I will discuss the sustainability of our house in a later post.

Another problem is that it’s not easy to get a UTP-cable to the attic, where I placed my PC. Now I’m using a power-line adapter, but it’s unable to utilize the full bandwidth of the cable Internet access. It also gives me a lot of interruptions in the connection, something the Spotify web app can’t cope with. WiFi is not an option either with my current router, the signal from the ground floor is too weak. I want to investigate if there is a possibility to push a UTP-cable to the attic through an existing electricity cable tube.

Then the environment. During the summer our home seemed like a permanent vacation home, with the beach at 15 minutes distance with a bicycle. The beach at Kijkduin is busy and has too much construction for my taste. The beach between Kijkduin and Scheveningen is less developed and more beautiful. The market of The Hague is the largest market of the Netherlands. There is plenty of choice in Surinamese and Indonesian restaurants. A tram stop lies at a distance of five minutes by foot from my front door. Unfortunately the tram is quite slow, I wish The Hague had a metro like Rotterdam.

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