Inside the Home of an Expat

I've said it many times now - I probably sound like a broken record. But here we go again, my wife and I are moving back to Canada. Our three year expat adventure has come to an end. I wish I could say that I was excited to be going back but in truth we really love Europe. If only our family and friends were here, and I had the ability to work in a meaningful profession. But anyway,

Who wants to see inside our home?!?

Front Facade

I know that you're curious so I took some photos just for you fellow Hivers.

Actually, I thought I'd take some photos of it for memory sake, but since I have them I may as well share them. Am I right!?

I already miss the privacy of our walls

What would you do if you were given a limited amount of free money to furnish your house for two years? *Two years was our initial timeframe by the way, which later turned into three.

Backyard Terrace

Well, you would probably go to Ikea!

Pretty much all of our furniture and accents are from Ikea. It's cheap and easy to assemble and it wasn't possible to bring much of our own furniture or personal items across the ocean, so Ikea it was. We only brought the essentials in a cargo plane (i.e clothes, bedding, cookware, and some games and books among a few other things).

Living Room

The exposed beams give the house a cottagey sort of look and feel.

Dining Room

Foyer Area

Downstairs Office Area?

Kitchen

Other Space we Hardly Use

The house is actually too big for just two people but our options were limited and since we were bringing our pets with us we were adamant that we wanted to have a backyard. This place just made the most sense for us overall. It was much better than the home with the 3 inches of water in the leaking basement, and certainly better than the home that we nicknamed the "Death House," on account of it appearing to be a haunted mansion.

Upstairs Bathroom

I regret taking apart our bed before I could take a photo. It's not quite the same, viewing an empty room as it is viewing one with a bed and proper furnishings in it. But what can you do?

Bedroom One

On that note, we had to toss our mattresses out a few weeks ago because there is only one "Big garbage Day" per year in our small town and that was our only way to get rid of them. As such, we have been sleeping on an air mattress and our fold out couch for some time now.

Bedroom Two

There are three other bedrooms upstairs as well as the two already shown - 5 in total.

One we turned into an office. Another one we turned into a large walk in closet for my wife 💃 and the last we turned into a room dedicated only to the cat littler box 😸😂. Like I said, it's way too much space for us, but what can you do when you fly across the ocean a few months before your move and only have 1 week to find a place to live in?

Shower Room 1

The bathrooms are super strange in this house. I'm obviously used to it by now but when we first got here I was really trying to make sense of it all. On the main floor there is a 2 piece bathroom (i.e. a toilet and sink) and upstairs their is a 4 piece bathroom (i.e. a toilet, sink, bathtub and shower). That all makes sense. From there it gets a little wonky though. Upstairs there is a closet size room with just a toilet in it but no sink, which is neither efficient or hygenic since you have to walk to a different room to wash your hands or skip the activity altogether. The master bedroom and that office room I showed you above have a shower and sink in them, but no toilet. Most shower rooms have a toilet in them in Canadafor efficiency of space and plumbing so it's what I'm used to. It's different here, I get it. This set up is functional anyway, in that people can shower even if the toilet is in use. However, it means that people who use the common toilet have to walk down the hall to the other bathroom to wash their hands which makes that toilet redundant, or they need to walk through someone else's bedroom, which is less than ideal and certainly an annoyance if its used in the middle of the night. It didn't matter for us because we are only two people but realistically, what would happen in a scenario of 5 people living in the house would be that bedroom 2 person would likely just never wash their hands after they use the toilet outside their room since it doesn't have a sink. People by nature are lazy, am I wrong?.

Anyway, on to the artwork!

Most of the artwork we bought when we first arrived was cheap Ikea posters that we framed and hung up to make the house a little more homey. From there we started to buy equally cheap destination posters of some of the places that we have been to.

These posters cost anywhere from 4 euros on the low end to a maximum of 10 euros on the... also very low end.

Some of them we quite like though and may even get them properly framed when we go back to Canada, like the Gruyere one above. It's a little smaller and is made from better paper than the shiny poster material of some of the others.

We actually quite like this old coffee advertisement as well since it's very French and will act as a good memory piece to our time in France.

We also bought these small paintings from an artist in Rocamador because they really suit our current house here in France. They are just prints and the weren't expensive or anything but I hope we can find a place for them in our slightly more modern house back home. Some of the other pictures on our walls can be seen in the photos above.

I don't have much more to say at this point. A little bit of our stuff gets disassembled and packed away each day and we have movers coming to pick it up over the next two days. Apparently, shipping all of it overseas will take anywhere from 6 weeks to 5 months! It's a good thing that we have most of what we need, most of our own personal furniture and what not is in storage back home to be delivered the day after we arrive.

So anyway, that's a look inside our French home.

Goodbye French House 👋

Well thats it for now. Until next time, thanks for stopping by.