Our Paris apartment is booked now! Yay, we have somewhere to stay. Since we are travelling with a baby we decided that we will base ourselves in Paris and do some trips to other nearby countries for a few days at a time. We are also planning on seeing some other areas of France. Given we are going to be there for 2 months it is more economical to get an apartment for that time. Even though we will be spending some nights in hotels when doing our side trips it is still cheaper to have an apartment than pay for hotels the whole time. Plus, we get more space, somewhere to leave our things and cooking and washing facilities.
The apartment search was long and annoying. We wanted to be somewhere fairly central (not that hard in Paris) and to have at least a separate bedroom and living area so that when the munchkin is sleeping we can watch tv/use the computer etc. We also wanted an adequate kitchen for the masterchef and washing facilities for all those nappies. Of course if budget was no option we would have hundreds to pick from. We started out looking at the cheaper end of the scale and had a few options but they were rapidly booking out for the time period we wanted. This was a little irritating since we had found places in early Feb but the agents weren’t interested in doing bookings that early. I would have thought for 2 months guaranteed rent they wouldn’t have cared about it being early, but apparently I’m not a French real estate agent. In the end most of the cheaper apartments had major sticking points. Such as: 5 flights of stairs with no lift, being the size of a shoe box, being in the middle of nowhere, no baby cot/babies allowed, or just looking damn uncomfortable.
We slightly upped our budget and had a whole new range of options. Most of them could still fit inside our main bedroom but that was better than something the size of our walk in pantry. We did heavily utilise google maps to calculate the distances from all potential apartments to things we wanted to see and were fond of google street view to check out the local area to make sure it had the right feel and a healthy supply of cheese shops and bakeries within walking distance. How did people ever trip plan without the internet? After many comparisons and much debate we finally settled on an apartment in Marais-Les Halles. The deposit has been paid and contracts signed. I’m still not sure how I’ll contain a small wandering Astrid in such a small space for so long but the upside is it won’t take long to clean 🙂 Here are a few pics of our temporary home come October…….
