Free shuttle to Ikea

Just a tip for those looking to take advantage of the soldes at Ikea - I just saw there is a free shuttle bus from Denfert Rochereau to Ikea Thias on Wednesdays, Saturday and Sundays.  There are departures at 11, 1:30 and 3pm on Wednesdays, and everyone 1.5hrs from 9:30 to 3:30pm during the weekends.  Return departures are also every 1.5hrs, so that leaves enough time to do your shopping and grab a few meatballs. :)

The shuttle pick-up is just off of Denfert-Rochereau at 77, bvld St Jacques:

Ikea's website says it is a 16 minute journey...I'm not quite sure I believe that, but since it's a free ride out there, who really cares?

You know, the funny thing was that C & I didn't really set out to buy an apartment.  Or at least not yet.  The truth was, we were still leaning towards doing a viager.  Actually buying an apartment just seemed so permanent, and who knew how long we'd stay in Paris?  

But we still decided to get a feel for the market, so like we did with our current apartment, we sat down and made a list of our desired features and neighborhoods, and then I set up a few SeLoger alerts to start to familiar with prices.

We got two hits almost immediately - one for a viager, and one to buy. We first visited the viager apartment, and it had the requisite view of the Eiffel Tower, but only from the balcony.  It was also missing the second bedroom we wanted, and it would need a ton of renovation were we to ever live in it.  The price was right and we wouldn't need a mortgage, but it was a bit outside of our search area.

The apartment for sale hit all of our criteria - more than 60m2, two bedrooms, great view, balcony, parking spot, good transport connections, limited reno needed, non-Haussmanian building, and it met our mortgage criteria.

So we decided to go check out.  We got lucky and were the first people to see it since the real estate agent was just coming back from her summer holiday. (Yes, that's how long ago this whole process started....).   C wanted to make an offer immediately after seeing it, I was a bit more hesitant.  After all, we weren't even really planning on buying an apartment, and certainly not in 2013!

But after thinking it over and realizing how rare it is to find a place to that checks all of the boxes (and I had all of the posts from "House Hunting in Paris" in mind), we crunched some numbers and decided to just go for it and put in an offer, which the seller accepted.

I'm mostly grateful that we have had so much luck both times around, especially given how much so many folks struggle to find a decent place to live in this city. Long-time readers may remember that we hadn't been planning on moving in together so soon either, but the perfect place came along right after I'd set up the search to get a feel for the market.  And now the same thing happens for this place.  Positive manifestation strikes again!