So now that we got the keys to the house we needed to move, fast, instead of paying rent for two homes we were now paying rent for two homes and a mortgage for a third. In order to move in we defined a couple of key success factors. First one is to focus on the remodeling of the bedroom right away, we were not about to move our bed into an unfinished room having to pull it all out again. Second, move all but our essential belongings to a storage unit and figure out what to keep later.

First thing on the list to get the bedroom ready is a new floor, the old floor was…. old, not great and differed between the bedrooms.

Step two was changing some electrical outlets because there were barely any. You want to at least be able to charge your phone on your side of the bed without running an extension cord.

Step 3 was painting, we wanted something different than what it was. We kind of knew what we wanted but we still had to try out 6 different shades on pieces of drywall to get even close. In the end it’s not exactly what we had in mind but we love it anyways. It turned out perfect with the lighting we chose later.

So it has been a while since my last post and this happened in the mean time. We bought a house. It all went pretty fast. In August of ’19 we found the house on the crazy Dutch housing market.

On Thursday the ad was posted on the major real estate website in the Netherlands. On Saturday we saw the ad, called the agent and really had to convince him that we were serious and wanted to schedule a visit (he already had about 15 visits scheduled). So on Monday we went to see the house and we were excited, the house has many not-so-great points but all are fixable and this meant the house was affordable in this market. Because of the big interest in the house there was an open day scheduled the next Saturday where another 11 interested parties attended. We decided to go and check it out again. By Sunday we placed our above-asking-price-bid, attached a letter explaining our situation and how low the risk is the seller has in opting for us and hoped for the best. …. On Monday we got the call, it’s ours, 9 parties placed a bid all within close proximity of each other, we made it with just € 500 over the second bid. Now what is so great about this house? It has a big garden for it’s price range, it has an amazing garage (16m deep), it’s situated in a small and quite neighborhood and it kind of needs a lot of fixing and small tweaks so that means we can really make it our own.

So now the real challenge began, getting the sale closed in as short a time as possible. The house was empty so the seller wants it to go fast and we were renting two homes and traveling many hours to and from work, so we were on the same page.

On the last Thursday of August we signed the purchasing agreement and immediately got a technical inspector to check the building (cause any big deficits would mean we could still pull out of the agreement). Luckily no big surprises next to the fixable issues we already spotted. We then proceeded to get a valuation on the house, get the bank to lend us the money and arrange a notary to transfer ownership. In the mean time we also had a vacation scheduled…. not ideal but we were not about to cancel our trip just because we found a house in this time period.

All in all, 24-09-2019, a record 4 weeks after we signed the purchasing agreement we were at the notary and getting the keys to the house.

Since this is no holiday-pictures-blog I won’t bore you with the complete timeline of our trip, but here are some cool pics anyway.

The first attempt at a fix didn’t work so we decided to take some time off and find a garage who could sell us a hose and some clamps so we could cut out the crappy part and put in the new hose. But the Swiss people screwed up our perfect plan by having a national holiday. So we tried something different. Just as Coca-Cola isn’t good for the human body it also isn’t good for fixing Subaru fueling hoses. So we removed everything and did the fix again but now only using duct tape and ty-wraps. Lots of them. And now it works, not a drop of gasoline spilled since. So we jumped in the Lake Lucerne to celebrate our fix and then quickly went on to catch up with the other teams.

After driving the Nürburgring we went on to look for some real rally experience. When we found some dirt roads the fun level went up significantly. Our car liked it so much that the old beast took some jumps. Unfortunately, the ginormous amount of gear meant the car was so low we punctured the already rusty fueling hose. Result, fueling the car creates an ocean of gasoline under the car and not a drop more in the tank….. Very bad for business. So we took out all the gear and made our first fix, Coca-Cola can, some kind of glue/silicone, ty-wraps, and duct tape. We drove it the entire day to harden and when we fueled up…. Same thing, the fix was as leaky as an ancient person who drank too much water.

More upgrades!

Here we are working on strengthening the front bumper by welding some steel in it.
Because our previous sound upgrade (the exhaust straight pipe) gave us such a performance increase we decided on adding more sound. So we are installing a subwoofer capable of delivering over 9000 Watts. So imagine the speed increase while “War – Low Rider” is blasting through this beast.

The Subaru Impreza is probably one of the most famous rally cars in history. So we decided it needed some rally-themed upgrades. The sound was already great so we added stickers for extra speed.

This is what we found to go on our top-gear-challenge-car-holiday this summer. A Subaru Impreza. This piece of car history only set us back 500 euros. Soon after, we did the first upgrade. Some of the dampers where cut out and a straight pipe was welded in. Performance increase: probably zero, sound increase: quite a bit, driving pleasure increase: infinite.

The E36 318 tds is no more, passing the MOT was getting more difficult and expensive every year. So the car moved on to the eternal plains. Well actually, some of its parts will now live on in another E36 that was driven into a solid object.

So I spotted a nice deal on an E39 with only 130k km on the clock, so I bought that and am now driving around with a 6 cilinder under the hood (in anticipation of the cobra V6).

It’s common knowledge that any car worth owning guzzles an ancient fuel called diesel.
Diesel is cheap but generally, old diesel cars are also pretty bad for the environment.
The composition of diesel has changed over the years and the seals in diesel pumps don’t like this. So eventually they just give up on life and this is the point where a diesel-car-owner also thinks about giving up on his. How to diagnose a dying fuel pump seal:

• Your mileage goes down significantly.
• Your car smells like a diesel factory.
• When you drive away from your parking spot you leave a puddle of excellent good fuel behind.

So diesel pump seals aren’t meant to last forever, and if the production date of this pump in question is about 18 years back on the calendar it’s not a big surprise that the Diesel in this pump does not care to be stopped by this 18 year old seal.

Also, Bosch likes it better when they get paid to repair their own equipment so they invented a stupid socket so you can’t easily open their pumps. Solution: make your own, anti-tamper-socket-tool.

When daytime is reserved for work, car repairs have to be done in the depths of night, luckily people invented flash lights and tiny mirrors on sticks.