House-hunting: the kid in the candy store

You know you’re getting serious about putting down roots when you start house-hunting. And I mean house-hunting. Not apartment-hunting, not townhouse-hunting. After scrolling in earnest these past few weeks through pages and pages of possibilities, I realized that at the back of my mind, I was looking at apartments dutifully but not happily. I even went to an ‘esittely’, open house, and saw one very nice apartment. Key word: nice. After a conversation with a colleague from Australia, I realized that we shared an unexamined prejudice: where we come from, you don’t live in apartments when you’re a grown-up if you’ve had any success in life. You don’t go looking for an apartment in your 50s unless your health is failing or you’re in bankruptcy. There’s a faint smell (metaphorical, of course) around considering apartments, something like that whiff of sadness and defeat you get when you walk into a second-hand store in the US (Goodwill in particular). And since this is my one and only life, I get to decide where I want to live, and it’s not going to be in an apartment – no matter how sensible that seems to Finns who point to such issues as maintenance, snow removal, traveling, summer cottages, proximity to downtown, and a score of other advantages. Oh, and the cost.

So this preference is irrational here in Finland (and in the US for that matter – how many people own single-family dwellings in Manhattan, for example?), but I have a right to have it, and once I accepted my irrational preference, I started to really enjoy looking for a new home. And I got very lucky, because my Australian colleague doesn’t mind looking at homes, and in fact seems to savor it (he was an electrician before he became an English professor, and he spent years renovating his own beautiful home), and he has come with me on most of these visits. We play good cop/bad cop as I explore and feel like a kid in a candy store, salivating at built-in corner cupboards, swooning over pönttöuunit (tell me if you have a better translation than “brick oven covered with sheet metal”) and admiring honey-colored wood floors, and he asks the hard questions: Why is it being sold? Why hasn’t it sold yet? Don’t you think it’s overpriced? How recently was the plumbing updated? How much insulation in the walls? etc. In fact, he’s been looking at homes for a long time, and some of the realtors recognize him (and tremble, I think).

You learn so much about a culture when you explore the nitty-gritty of how its members live. All of the houses have saunas, because that is a necessity, but many of them have only one toilet (“You Americans really love your bathrooms, don’t you?”). I’ve seen some houses with beautiful wood paneling and floors, but one realtor said “Finns don’t like all that wood”; some wood floors are covered up with linoleum. Many homes, maybe even most, have a potato/cold storage cellar under a trap door in the kitchen, with treacherous stairs leading straight down. How do you maneuver that when you’re in your 70s? (Oh. That’s why some of these houses are being sold. And thank goodness I have male friends who were willing to climb down into them for me, because you probably shouldn’t do it in a skirt.) Some are set on land that is part of the sale; others are on land that the city leases to you for decades, and you pay around one thousand Euros in rent per year, depending on the size of the lot. You have to shell out a rather high sales tax (4%, I think), but low property tax (laughably low – 100 Euros annually for one home I looked at). 

And clearly, Finns take up less living space than Americans. My house in Oregon is a whopping 232 square meters. It’s a pretty good sized house in the US but nothing extravagant. I just searched for homes that size for sale in this area, and there were only 5 that size or larger, the only one in my price range located way out in the country. Have you ever been to IKEA and seen the ‘small-space’ home display? It feels a bit like that looking at homes in Finland.

And then there are the snow/cold issues. Triple panes are a must. If the home has wood siding, it needs to start a certain distance off the ground or the snow will rot it during the slow spring melt. All homes have a snow ladder so you can knock heavy drifts off the roof. Heating is a real deal-maker or deal-breaker – oil heating is the most expensive, a heat pump highly coveted, and all kinds of alternatives in between exist as well (district heating, electric with radiators, etc.). Most of the homes have a wood closet for stacking your firewood conveniently so you don’t need to lose any digits or your nose running out for more wood when it’s 30 below.

I haven’t even mentioned the ‘kuntotarkastuslausunto’. This is the inspection report, and you can imagine the kind of vocabulary words you might find there. I am so lucky to have Finnish friends willing to go through this document for me; I was steered clear of a house I fell in love with but whose past was too checkered to risk a long-term relationship.

So many choices. Maybe this is the thing I find most difficult about looking for a house: it forces me to examine what I want vs what I need, and it brings up difficult-to-answer questions, some of them very uncomfortable: How much longer will I live in Joensuu? What will I do when I retire? How long will I be able to ride a bike around? Will I always live alone? Will I go to the US every summer? How often will my children come to visit? Will I need to take grandchildren into account?

Maybe I should get an apartment after all.

But to get serious again: figuring out what I want – never mind what I need – has never been easy for me. But I take solace from a wise Finnish friend who said I should simply wait until my mind and my heart come to an agreement about which house to pick. At this point it feels like I’m wrestling with a blanket that’s too short. I just have to figure out which corner to tug at and which part of my body to leave cold. Then I can settle back and savor my candy.