Berit's Blog

If you ever want to truly test the strength of your relationship, live with your partner in a 300 sq. ft. apartment for at least one year. Nearly two years ago I moved into my fiancé Emil’s studio apartment in Oslo. Emil had purchased the apartment two years prior as a place to live while he completed his studies. It was the perfect pad for a single guy who doesn’t care if he has to keep his clothes in the kitchen cupboards or whether the toilet is actually bolted to the floor. It was a typical Oslo apartment: small, efficient and economical. As an American, I’d grown accustomed to enormous closets, full-size refrigerators and stable toilets, but in Norway Emil’s place was simply koselig or cozy.

After one year of living in such close quarters, we decided to upgrade. Having never sold or purchased a home before, the entire process was foreign to me. The first step was to hire a realtor and get the apartment appraised. Next we hosted an open house or visning, and to our great luck, a bidding war ensued over our apartment. Bidding wars over apartments are common occurrences in the Oslo real estate market, as the demand is high and the number of apartments is relatively low in comparison.

With three months to go before the new owner was scheduled to take over our apartment, we eagerly began an intense house-hunt. We knew that we wanted to stay in Oslo, but were unprepared to deal with the prices. Recently reported by The Economist, Oslo is the most expensive city in the world, and housing is no exception. As I longingly gazed at advertisements and attended open houses for two million kroner, one-bedroom apartments, my mother ever-so-gently reminded me of the fabulous single-family homes available on the outskirts of Minneapolis, complete with a backyard and several bedrooms, for the price of a small Oslo apartment.

But Oslo was where we had settled and high prices in this city are not optional. Anyone who has ever house-hunted in Norway knows that the best place to conduct the search is http://www.finn.no. For three months I spent hours pouring over this site, getting increasingly more proficient at planning our visning-filled weekends.

I learned quickly not to fall in love with apartments in Oslo, as the process for buying an apartment is very competitive. Emil and I bid on a two-bedroom, newly renovated flat in a popular, centrally-located neighborhood in Oslo. We smartly bid below the asking price and expected it to be a smooth, easy process. The realtor phoned and informed us of a counter offer from an eager buyer in Trondheim. Having already planned out where I would put the furniture and the paint colors for the walls, we became increasingly aggressive bidders. We went back and forth with our competitor from Trondheim for several hours, until finally the price was simply too high and we were forced to back down. I still drive by that apartment every once in a while and try to catch a view of our Tronder rival...but it's been difficult due to the massive, noisy and inconvenient construction project right outside the building.

The apartment we finally did buy proved to be worth the wait. We were relaxed about it, not in love with it, and felt that it was just right for us. It was a gorgeous weekend in May when we placed our bid, and I think too many people were out enjoying the weather to bother attending a visning, to our apparent luck. With no counter offers, the apartment was ours in just two hours time. We signed the papers and moved in.

No longer keeping our clothes in the kitchen has been a great luxury for us and we would never trade our koselig Oslo apartment for a single-family home in America’s suburbs

Originally appeared in Viking magazine