Getting Ready to Buy a House

On Wednesday Jan 8 we had a doctor appointment in Porto.  Our usual method for these is to take Uber over and back since there is no traffic or parking to deal with and it is door-to-door service.  This worked just fine again, but this time Gerrit had an actual conversation with the Uber driver on the way over.  It was about five minutes of pure Portuguese.  Gerrit told him how long we had been in Portugal, that we had just bought a house, asked him how to say several words and phrases he was unsure of, and some other small talk too.  He says it was really exciting and fun.

Across the street from our apartment we saw this great example of European parking.

And here's a food shot of a recent salmon and veggie dinner at home, just to pump up the photo content of this otherwise non-visual blog post.  Gerrit did the salmon and Pat did the mushroom / pepper / spinach sautee.  We had a nice red wine with it.  (We don't subscribe to the red-with-meat, white-with-fish philosophy.  That seems sort of like saying "oh, you can't have pasta alfredo with your beef, it must be potatoes".  Wine is just another flavor with the dinner.  Some flavors don't go well together, to be sure, like cotton candy and prime rib, but for the most part we think you can just enjoy the different flavors of your meal blending and contrasting.)

Then we learned that we can't just wire funds to escrow to purchase the house as we were planning.  We need to present a quaint old-fashioned bank check at the deed signing.  Gerrit scrambled Wednesday evening (morning in Seattle) to get the funds wired from our US account to our Portuguese account, worrying that they would get here on time.  The following morning he called our Gaia banker to tell him the funds were coming, and found out that he was out of the office until Monday.  That's cutting it a little close.  We then called our actual account manager in the city of Cascais (two bankers?  it's a long story) and were told that anyone in the bank can issue bank checks.  So that gives us a little flexibility.

And after all this we got the official letter from the real estate lawyer describing the entire upcoming transaction, which said that directly wiring funds is acceptable too!  Good grief.  Well, we will push this whole thing through somehow but it may take longer than next Tuesday.  Or maybe it will be a mad chaotic scramble and actually get done at the last minute, Portuguese style, like our visa application did.

On Thursday Gerrit worked up a computer program to automatically search and insert the audio links into these blog posts.  That's been a pretty tedious process up to now, but from here on out it will be easy.  Just to test it, let's put a bunch of Portuguese words in here from our blog audio database and see if it will find them: Boa tarde!  Bem vindo a Casa da Rocha!  Would you like some vinho verde?  Yep, works like a champ.

Then Friday was a breakthrough day.  The money we'd wired from our US bank arrived here at our Portugal bank, nice and quick.  So we went to the bank, got the necessary bank checks, and verified that taxes can be paid at the deed signing by a debit card.  The debit card limit is lifted for paying taxes, which is a convenient way to pay a large previously-unknown amount in front of a notary.  So we are good to go for the deed signing on Tuesday, and should be moved into Casa da Rocha before the end of the month!  We're pretty excited.

Our contractual lease on this apartment runs through February, but our landlord already has new tenants waiting (that's how hot the housing market is here).  We're on good terms and could probably get a refund for the last month's rent if we are out by the end of January, but we won't push it.  We'll let him get double rent for February, his new tenants will be happy to get out of their AirBnB, and we'll be happy to get to Casa da Rocha as quickly as possible.  It's a win-win-win.

And here's another photo boost, a nice wedge of sunset as seen from our apartment on Sunday night.  Just wait to compare this with the sunsets we'll see in Casa da Rocha.

(As usual, you can click on any photo to enlarge it, scroll through them all, and click outside a photo when you're done.  Also, you can click on the bold underlined phrases to play the audio.)

Home