It’s been a while since we posted anything about the house, mainly because not much is happening right now. The lawyer is working on setting up our company and we won’t complete on the house sale until that is done. It usually takes about four weeks to register a company but, at the moment, the process is taking a few weeks longer. This year in Bulgaria all company owners have been required to re-register their companies – not sure why, it’s just one of those fun legal things invented to out-fox people. Anyway, the deadline is the end of the year so every man and his donkey are currently busy re-registering their companies. It’s good timing for us because we won’t have to worry about re-registering, but bad timing because the system is clogged with more applications than usual.
We have had an update from Max (our agent) to say all is going through okay so now it’s just a matter of waiting patiently. This is convenient because waiting patiently is a real skill of mine (NOT). Having said that, now the initial excitement/nervousness/stomach-twisting horror of making an offer has passed, we are actually being quite calm about the whole process. I spent much of the first week convinced that the sellers would pull out at any minute and we would lose our beautiful house. We really loved the village and my concern was that if we lost this house we may have to wait a long time for another house in the village to come up for sale. However, there is nothing we can do from here in England so I’ve learned to relax and leave it to the professionals. Fingers crossed though, sometime in the next month we’ll be making another trip out to Bulgaria to sign the final paperwork and complete the sale.
That process itself sounds like good fun: everyone involved in the sale gathers with the local notary to sign the official contract. In cases where several cousins or siblings are the owners (say, if they inherited the property), they would all be there in the room! Plus lawyers, notary, estate agent and the buyers! In our case, just two brothers own the house so it should be a more manageable affair. I wonder what they’ll make of us.
