Apartment #1

    Our company has a process for handling international moves.  It's standard.  Residency paperwork is done in advance, and everything else gets figured out when you get there.  It is normal to reside in a temporary apartment for 4-8 weeks while searching for a long term home and getting a feel for the city and different neighborhoods.  There are two reasons for this.  One is the idea that after a few weeks, you might have a better idea of what part of town you want to live in, and therefore you end up in the best house for you and your family, instead of on the wrong side of town.  It's a nice idea I guess, if it worked.  The reality of the situation is that there are no houses.  There are barely even short term apartments available.  And that's how we ended up here, in a 4 bedroom, 80 sq ft apartment, with the tiniest kitchen I've ever seen and ONE bathroom for the five of us.  Thank goodness we left the dogs at home for now.  The location is good though, we are only about a four minute walk to one of the main shopping streets, and about 9 minutes to the school bus stop.  The other, more practical reason, is that it takes 4-6 weeks on average for the shipment of goods to arrive, so even if we had a house, we'd have nothing to put in it.       

Alright, a brief tour:

** Warning, may be frightening for readers who have only lived in Texas-sized homes **

Living room, children for scale.  We can't really comfortably all watch a movie in here.  

Breakfast / work / games / homework / clutter catcher / dinner table: 

Again, we struggle to all have dinner at the same time.  The plates and chairs barely fit.

The ONE bathroom.  Ugh, no one warned me about this.  One bathroom for five people is really not ideal.  It's especially problematic in the morning when everyone needs in there for various reasons and we have a school bus to catch.  It is common in Europe to have the washer and dryer in the bathroom.  I'm not really sure why.  I moved one of the chairs in here to we'd have a place to put our clean clothes while showering, otherwise they would just go on the floor I guess?  There are also zero plugs for blow drying hair, so we have to do stuff like that blind. 

The dude den.  Good thing all he does is sleep in here, because there isn't space for anything else.

Same set up for the girls room.  Slightly more junkified, in the way that girls tend to do that.  

There are two other bedrooms, one of which we have been using for storage / closet space, the other one for the adults.

And, the kitchen.  It is my greatest success of 2025 that I have been successfully feeding my kids out of this space for the last three weeks.  See what happens if you open the dishwasher and the freezer at the same time... you can't.

And now that I've showed you all that, we're moving!  The housing situation is dismal.  They have showed us two houses so far.  One of them is very expensive and well out of our price range.  And old and not well insulated and the fireplace is dangerous and sometimes the lights go out if you plug in kitchen appliances?  No thanks.  The other one, well, let's just say it makes this apartment we are in look kind of nice.  It clearly hasn't been updated since about 1975.  In the last two weeks, not one single new house has become available for rent in the entire city of Oslo!  So this weekend, we are moving to a different apartment, about twice the size of the one we are in, and hopefully a little bit nicer.  Probably still just one bathroom though.  It was not available when we first arrived or we would have been put their originally instead.  We had hoped to find a house asap, but since that isn't happening, we are relocating to a bigger apartment, and preparing to bring the dogs over, even though dogs in an apartment is no no no fun.  But it's temporary.  This means a new route to school, and a new bus stop for the kids.  So far they have all been holding up really well, but I am nervous to keep pushing the limits on how much change they can handle without falling apart. 

Walking to and from the school bus stop, and a little bit of the surrounding area.