Number 13

Here are the first photos of our house! (Lets hope that we get the bond/mortgage! ;-)

House

Accepted

We are going to be house owners! We came to an agreement yesterday about the house we saw last weekend. We are signing the papers today...

Rejected

Our offer on the house we wanted to buy was rejected.
Not what we hoped, but we are not too upset about it.
The seller was not happy to come down almost anything in price and left no room for negotiation. They offered -2%. Our offer was 8.5% below asking price. It is funny when you know that they are making about 400% profit on the property anyway since they were lucky to buy at the right point in time. The house has just come on the market so I guess they also want to see if they can get any other (better?) offers and not just take the first one. I don't blame them!
And I wish we also bought 7 years ago!

I have also really caught a cold: coughing, sniffing sneezing and a dull head ache. Not much fun at all!

Rain, cold and an offer!

Winter is here and the weekend rained away in the Western Cape.
The golf I had planned was canceled and course was closed, so I didn't get to play.
We were still very lucky if you compare with all the homeless people in Cape Town who do suffer when it is wet and cold... (Snow, ice, hail hit hard)

I "sniff" have "sniff" a cold. Started with a very sore throat and "sniff" now the nose is running to "cough cough". I think I feel the cold even more here than in England and it is never this cold in Sweden, at least not indoors! What central heating?! We are lucky that we did buy two radiators!

We decided to go house hunting again since it was raining and we did find something interesting again. To make a long story short: we have now put an offer in. For real! So we just have to wait and see! Very exiting! The seller have 48 hours to decide if the offer is "good enough"!

17 May, Norway's national day!

Tonight I will be celebrating Norway's national day together with the Norwegian Society in Cape Town.
There are also quite a few swedes going to all the activities and meetings so I wont be the only non Norwegian person there.
The Norwegian Society is much more active than the Swedish which seems to have stopped all activity and seized to exist...
"Skål!" (Cheers!) for Norway!

Golf and Mothers day

I like golf but I have not played as much as I would have liked since I arrived in South Africa, despite the good weather. I even played more in the UK were I was a member at Surrey National GC.
However, I have played and I did so on Saturday at Mowbray GC with Martin and Fraser. The golf was very, very slow but it was enjoyable since we had fantastic weather; not too hot and sunshine. The golf itself was the opposite to the weather: bad! But we are not giving up and are playing again this weekend at De Zalze which is supposedly in beautiful shape.
I also played at Atlantic Beach 6 weeks ago and enjoyed some stunning views. Check out the photos from Atlantic Beach and Mowbray

Golf in SA

It was mothers day on Sunday and we celebrated Barbara (Rene's mom) with tea and scones together with Rene's family at her sister Julie's house, which is only a stone throw away from us. (All other mothers was also celebrated!)
We later went house hunting again together with Joggie & Barbara. We saw quite a few houses but nothing that was worth putting in an offer on. We finished off with an early dinner at The Ocean basket! Yummy prawns and calamari!

My running practice have been going well and I have not had much problems with my calves as I have had previously. I have also been thinking about running my first half marathon, but it is not going to happen this coming weekend since I pulled a muscle in the back of my thigh! :-( Not very nice at all! So I have to play golf instead. Poor me! ;-) The race I am practicing for is not until 14^th July in Knysna, so I got time to heal.
My friend's Peter & Jennie ran their first half marathon last weekend in Gothenburg; the Göteborgsvarvet! And they did finish with very impressive times; 1.43 and 1.57!

Happy Birthday Susanna!

Congratulations on your birthday!
(Grattis på födelsedagen!)
It is my sisters birthday today the 11 May.

To buy or not to buy... (And Fulham beat Liverpool :-)

Cape Town was beautiful last weekend with sunshine and +30C. I almost forgot that we heading towards winter in the southern hemisphere...

We have also been looking at more houses and have seen one that we think is (or was) worth buying. This house is located in Edgemead a suburb outside Cape Town. However the estate agent thought that our offer was too low for the seller to accept… Our offer was about 8% below the asking price. The thing is that you can now check on the internet what the seller bought the house for and what other houses in that street was sold for. It is a quite neat service called Sold Price Index or Property SPI. So we do know that our offer is not unreasonable even if we could increase it a little bit. But I guess it is easy to get carried away when you are about to sell and the estate agent have told you what your property is worth. I don't think even our final bid will reach what the seller wants... Another estate agent told us "You can always take off 5% on a correctly priced house" and we are sticking to that in this case since we would need to do some minor alterations anyway, if we did buy the hose.

The state of the SA housing market is otherwise a bit crazy and the prices has sky-rocketed the last couple of years. For example: The house we are looking at right now, has increased by 75% in less then 3 years, if the seller gets the asking price. Another thing is that the interest rates are about 10-12.5% which is about 3 times more than in the UK and Sweden :-(
(To be continued ...)

Fulham FC won the important home game against Liverpool on Sunday with 1-0. Let's hope that "the Whites" can pull their socks up and stay up in the Premiership this year too. Fulham has otherwise applied a strategy which is to sell all players that are performing well and then blame the coach if team is not winning any games!

30 Seconds in Worcester

We spent the last weekend in Worcester with some good friends; Clinton, Chandre, Fraser and Nicole. The weather was terrible on Thursday evening when driving to Worcester and it rained on and off, on the Friday but it was beautiful again on Saturday morning. You could also feel that it is autumn and that we are moving towards winter... The leaves on the wines are also changing and there are already snow on the mountain tops!

Worcester in autumn

We did a bit of wine tasting during the day and we braaied (BBQ-ed), played pool and played the game 30 Seconds in the evening!
30 Seconds is always fun especially after a few drinks. We witnessed again how someone (no names!) went from being unable to answer any question to being "Einstein" getting all questions right and then go back to having some "struggles"! And I know the frustration after answering the the clue "Surname of Fred and Barney" with "Stone"?! (Yes, that is wrong and should be "Flintstones".) The conclusion must be that you should only drink alcohol in moderation, if at all, if you are going to play 30 Seconds. I also find find questions were the answer is " Alan Donald" or "Polokwane" extremely difficult, but I have only been living in SA for about 6 months! But then someone else (still no names) didn't know "Björn Borg"! ;-)

Saw a film on TV, while recovering, that made me miss England a bit: Goal. It's a quite predictable story and it isn't that good but you get to see a bit of London, Fulham FC, pubs, football, rain, mud, gray skies and much of Newcastle where James and Jill now are living. (Geordies do have a cool accent ;-)

The house we saw last week has already been sold so we are still looking...

And Rene has run another half-marathon! Very impressive!