The apartment below me has just been sold. I was going to link to the advert but it went down as soon as the apartment sold (which it did, immediately, for $416 157.00/€371 751.40/£274 148.226). These photos all belong to Notar, Sweden. The apartment is exactly the same layout as mine – two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, bathroom, hallway and walk in closet.
I am lucky to live in such a beautiful area. On the top of a hill beside a forest and metres from the second biggest lake in Sweden, Mälaren. Despite the pastoral feel of it, I am fifteen minutes from the centre of the city. I can take a bus, boat, tram or underground to work and use my monthly travel card to do it.
The area is a former working class area being gentrified at the moment – lots of factories have been turned into loft apartments and many people want to live here. A few years ago no one wanted to buy apartments like mine, but now they are in huge demand.
An interesting cultural thing is that Swedes talk about their apartments in terms of rooms (rather than number of bedrooms) and square metres. I now know exactly how many square metres things are but when I moved to Sweden I didn’t have a clue! So an apartment would be described as 2 rooms, 45 m2, rather than one bedroom. I come from a small town so my last house in South Africa was over 300 m2 and my last apartment was 110 m2 so it took me a long time to get used to living in such small spaces.
There is also a huge housing shortage in Stockholm. People are on the waiting list for rental apartments for up to 30 years. It can easily take 12 years before you find a rental apartment and even then it may not be what you want. And as you can see above, Stockholm house and apartment prices are crazy.
I am not a Swedish minimalist and my spaces are not so Scandinavianly white so this is what my smaller bedroom looks like. I use it as an office so it is neat but cluttered and I love working here. The igloos on the floor are to keep the cats off my desk. They don’t often work! The light is missing a shade because the cat jumped from the chair to try and get inside it. Needless to say the shade lost the battle. I have now replaced it though!
