We're buying a flat! (and moving soon)

My future studio! (Our vendors were using it as their kid's room, it most definitely won't look like this when I'll use it, haha)

Okay, so I was avoiding talking about this too much for fear of jinxing it, but since we are 1 week away from officially moving...

My partner and I bought a flat!

Up until a year or two ago, this is not something I even dared hope I'd one day be able to say...

We've been looking to buy for about a year now (almost exactly), and it was NIGHTMARISH. We visited so many places, inside and outside of London (we need to be at least within one hour commuting for my partner's job), and even put some offers on some places, but the market was absolutely wild, and nothing was working. 

One of the places we put an offer on went for 55k OVER asking price. Which...what? How?

We found our flat in October, while the market was at its most uncertain, and I think that, ironically, that worked in our favour. I can guarantee we would not have been able to afford it if things had been the same as they were 4 months before.
As our luck may have it, this flat ended up being everything we were hoping for and more. While it isn't all that close to public transport (one of the reasons it was more affordable), it is in London! Which is insane to me.
And not only is it in London, but it is more affordable than literally every other place we considered or even looked at up to then. I'm quite gobsmacked.

We can mostly afford to buy thanks to my partner, who has a decently paid job, and received some help from his parents. My part of the deposit comes from money I inherited from my mother when she died when I was little (I do want to make clear that it is not money I saved from my job. It is generational wealth I am incredibly fortunate my family passed down to me, even if it was from tragic circumstances. Being able to save anything from my income is still a...work in progress at this stage...).
Let me tell you, trying to retrieve that money from the claws of the french banking system, where it has been for the past 14 years, has been quite the adventure in itself...Iv'e been at it for almost 2 years now, and I still haven't received it XD

I have a much smaller share of the property than my partner (which also means I have less to repay every month than him though), and most definitely was the biggest liability when it came to getting a mortgage, but it worked out!

And now I can say I am part owner of a whole damn flat in London. 

And I want to thank you all for this. 

Without my regular income from Patreon, I'm not sure my side of the mortgage application would have been quite as stable as it was. And I have all of you to thank for that. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I owe this incredible privilege in part to all of you.

I am also doubly glad we are moving into our place when we are, because our landlady decided she wanted to kick us out literally DAYS before we told her we were going to move out, and to be honest with you, I don't know what would have happened if we weren't buying. She initially wanted us to leave 4 days before Christmas (fun-_-), but we begged to stay until February, and she agreed provided we pay a bit more for those 2 months (yay-_-).
Rental prices in London are inhuman right now, and I don't know that I would have been able to afford them, so we dodged a bullet there for sure.

So our stars definitely aligned on that one, and I am filled to the brim with gratitude for everything. It's even a little overwhelming! 

All that to say, that if my communication is a little patchy the coming weeks, it's because we are moving!

I might do a little moving vlog, but we'll see how that goes.
I'll definitely film setting up my new studio :).

In the meantime, I just wanted to update you officially, thank you from the bottom of my heart, and generally freak out a little. 

We've had the worst solicitors, who made the whole thing rather stressful, but we are finally, finally, at a point where we can look forward to it all. And I am so excited.

Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and I send you all so so much love.