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I lived almost 40 years in the Netherlands and managed to avoid the windmills. But now that I’m basically a tourist I can finally surrender.

I went to Kinderdijk with the Fast Ferry, a boat that goes between Rotterdam and Dordrecht, mainly to avoid the traffic jams for commuters. In the rush hour it is faster to go by boat than by car, even over twenty kilometre. We, my friend Peter and his daughter Madelief, went after the rush hour so we had the boat almost to ourselves. We had our bikes with us (you can take them with you for free) and after we got of at Kinderdijk we rode towards the windmills. There are 19 of them, very close together and originally used to pump the water from the lower ‘polder’ to the canal that’s about 5 meters higher. And even the canal is just marginally above sea level. We made a rather long bike ride, especially because the first 10 kilometres was along with the wind and after that we had to go 10 km against the wind to return. And there was a lot of wind. But all in all a very nice day, too bad that Alison isn’t in the Netherlands yet, but still in Canada. She’ll arrive coming Friday, but I had bought my ticket last year already and couldn’t change the date. Ah well, it’s a good way for me to have my jetlag in private, without bothering her with my bad temper and overall grumpiness.

There are a lot of people in the Netherlands. I had almost forgotten that fact.

I’m in the Netherlands.

This afternoon I saw two men in our garden. For a moment I was afraid it was the realtor putting up a “A vendre” sign. But no, they were just measuring the whole lot to make a so-called “Certificat de localisation”. It’s a document that exactly describes the property. And when i write exactly I mean exactly. I overheard them saying “4 cm” for the width of the garden fence…

Half an hour later the bank called. Our mortgage is approved! Thanks for everybody that crossed their fingers/thumbs/whatever. It apparently helped.

So we’re one step closer to buying the house. Probably the actual sale will happen when we come back from our trip to the Netherlands, early June.

In Québec you have to pay tax twice, once to the province of Québec, and once to federal Canada. The total amount is comparable with the amounts I paid in the Netherlands, but higher than in other provinces, and much higher than in the US of course. But I’m not going to complain about that. Other people can do that much better than I do.

But this also means you have to file taxes twice, and fill out a lengthy form for both Canada and for the province of Québec. And those forms are horribly bad designed. Maybe I’m spoiled with the, in my opinion, excellent Dutch forms, but this is just ridiculous. If the forms where better designed, people would make less errors and processing the forms by the poor people who work at the tax office would also be faster and cheaper. When they introduced the new forms in the Netherlands they paid their cost back in 4 years.

I would have liked to include here, as a comparison, a link to a Pdf of the Dutch forms and one to the Canadian tax forms (the Quebec forms are slightly better designed). But I can’t because the Dutch forms are personalised and are not available online. Online they only have a link to a computer application that you can use to file your tax electronically. And even though it’s free and available for all major operating systems, it’s not exactly well designed. But I found a couple of images that show at least a glimpse of Dutch tax form design.

Because we were a bit behind with filing our taxes (I won’t go into details) I went to the respective tax offices to deposit the envelopes in person. Unlike in the Netherlands, you have to put stamps on tax envelopes here, and because I had to include a lot of attachments, being self employed and having a lot of medical receipts last year due to my accident and major dental work, going in person saved us quite a bit of money on stamps.

We enjoy an early spring this year. The dreaded brown period, when everything is ugly and bare, actually passed very fast. If you look at photos from last year all the trees were still bare and now they are already either green or flowering.

This woodpecker apparently had vertigo. All the holes in this tree were below 2 meters from the ground.

We found this tree in the Adirondacks were we, on this gorgeous Saturday with clear bleu skies and 20 degrees, went for a long hike with Poupoune. She enjoyed it very much and so did we. Getting away from the house, the computer and all the house-buying fuzz felt really good. Even though we couldn’t stop talking and thing about the whole idea. Secretly we where already planning what to do to the house and in what order to do them. However, doing so surrounded by trees that started to show their leaves is much less stressful.

Okay, here’s the latest in the house buying saga.

As I wrote before the building inspector found some defects to the house. It turned out there was nothing major (the foundations are fine) that would prevent us from buying it at all, but still some things that will cost a considerable amount of money to fix. And this on top of all the stuff that we knew had to be done because of a serious lack of maintenance over the last ten years.

But worse was the news that the bank wouldn’t want to give us the mortgage we need. Not because our credit is bad, or the bank thinks we can’t afford it, but because they evaluated the building much lower than the price we offered. The building itself is worth it, but because it has more than one apartment they also look at it’s investment potential. The return on investment is not that great because the current rents are very low. So they are only willing to give us a much lower mortgage. Darn! Especially since the fact that we paid such low rents the last couple of years also made it possible for us to save enough money to afford the high down payment we need to make.

But our hopes of being able to buy our house were pretty low all of a sudden. Especially when we approached another bank and asked them if they would evaluate the house differently and the answer was no.

With this news we called the owner Wednesday and told her that we needed to talk. She was busy the next couple of evenings so we agreed we would meet today.
This gave us the time to do a lot of planning, prepare elaborate spreadsheets with all kind of scenarios and options. This is the maximum we can pay with this type of mortgage and then this will be our monthly costs. And the same with other options and amounts. A big thank you to the inventors of the spreadsheet is in order here. And no that was not Microsoft but a couple of math geeks who made VisiCalc for the Apple. But I digress.

Just a couple of hours before our planned meeting the owner’s friend, who helps her with selling the house and also does the lack of maintenance, called that she wouldn’t be there because she just heard her son had a serious accident and was in a coma.

But the owner herself did meet with us and she had a cunning plan up on her sleeve.

When we showed her the building inspection report and some of our calculations she was willing to lower the price with a considerable amount. And she proposed to lend us the rest of the sum (above what the bank is willing to finance), so in fact we would take a loan with her for a couple of years. We looked it up in our “how to buy a home” books and on the Internet and this construction even has a name. It’s called a Vendor Take Back Mortgage, and is not too uncommon.

We prepared a new ‘Promise to Buy’ document with the new selling price and the new financing method and both parties signed.

Of course this was all on a Friday evening, we couldn’t consult the bank and our notary, so we’re still not 100% sure.

Beginning of next week we’ll find out more. It looks much, much rosier now, though, but don’t congratulate us yet. We’re not there yet.

Just an ugly alley between two big buildings in downtown Montréal. If this was in the Netherlands at least three government agencies would have fined the building’s owner. Montréal is not a very beautiful city, partly because it’s poor. And also because apparently nobody cares too much about cleanliness and beauty.

Since today (coincidently the 24th) we don’t have cable anymore. We weren’t watching much TV anyway and with the big spending ahead we need to spend our money wisely.

So for my weekly dose of Jack Bauer I now have to rely on BitTorrent. After downloading I move my laptop to the TV room, attach it to the TV and press play. That works excellent and I even have a little wireless remote to control the computer so I can start, stop and rewind. A glass of orange juice, a nice cigar and I’m ready to get all worked up over the stupidity of the writers of 24. It’s getting sillier every season. The president of the US secretly planning a terrorist attack, who could invent such an improbable plot?