It's a very big day today. We will be signing the legal agreement to sell our apartment. We enjoyed a bit of a lie-in, then spent a good part of the day starting our packing up. Our plan is to put as much as possible into our largish handbags (which won't be weighed) and max out our backpack cabin bags to 7kg.
The bike box ,which we've constructed to transport our paintings, weighs in at 18 kg. That leaves us a maximum remaining weight of 32 kg to share between the two suitcases. Once we'd put most of our clothing into the vacuum bags we'd brought over with us, there actually seemed to be surprisingly little bulk left. We have lots of odds and ends. The few tools we are taking back will have to go into the suitcases (not cabin bags) and we have a couple of bottles of booze. I think we are going to have plenty of capacity at the end of the day.
Our appointment with the notaire was set for 4.30pm. We hotfooted it to his office before it started to rain again. The weather has been unseasonably wet. With decent showers of rain most days for 6 weeks or more the locals are actually starting to complain, even though they still need the rain to recharge the water table. Everyone is crying out for sun! The forecast is for the weather to start fining up later this week.
Our real estate agent and buyers also turned up in good time for our rendez-vous. The notaire was very particular about taking us through all the implications of the documents we were signing, particularly ensuring the buyers knew everything they needed to about the apartment. It was fairly laborious and took 1.5 hours, however, at the end we had signed the documents. There were literally dozens of pages to initial or sign in full. The real estate agent witnessed the separate agreement between ourselves and the buyers to purchase the furnishings separately as the notaire refused to to make a point of showing his displeasure at our taking the furnishings out of the official contract.
Happy days. In fact it was rather an auspicious day for Patrick and Lucy. It was Patrick's birthday. It was definitely appropriate to celebrate both the signing and birthday with a glass of wine at one of Ceret's bars. Which is exactly what we did.
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| Celebrating with Patrick and Lucy, the future owners of our apartment. |
Later that evening we listed the car on Le Bon Coin and within 20 minutes received 3-4 requests for information or to view the car. By bedtime that had grown to perhaps eight. We had put a very competitive 1900 Euro price on it, and could probably easily have made it 2000E or even 2100E, but we just wanted to make sure we sold it quickly. The first guy to ring up said he would come and view it tomorrow afternoon and would bring cash. We had to put all the other interested parties on hold until he fronts up and confirms he will take it. If he doesn't we definitely have at least one other person who will.
