Sliding wall...

Forgot to mention in the apartment plan you may have noticed a sliding 'door' from the main bedroom into the living room.  Well, this is in fact a whole half sliding WALL that goes in between the fixed half.  The main bedroom door is on the hall side of the room.  It creates an enormous feeling of space, so if it's just us at home, we could have the wall open except at bedtime - not sure, but an interesting concept that we will play with.  We have thought about having a walk in wardrobe built behind where the bed is in the main bedroom.  There are no built ins in a new Dutch building, you have to do it all yourself. Because it is a former display apartment it has the laminated flooring, beautiful kitchen and wall coverings - in this case wall paper that looks like plain textured paint finish on concrete walls - very good indeed.  The bathroom and toilet is sold completed in each apartment.  I actually can't remember all that much detail about the kitchen except it has black stone bench tops and white soft closing cupboards/drawers, a five burner cook top including a real wok burner, dishwasher and the fridge is built in with doors matching the cupboard finish. I don't remember this fridge being enormous, but it does have fridge/freezer in two sections and was a good brand (but forgotten it for now).

The heating system is via a process whereby the heat is removed from the ceilings via several vents, filtered and refreshed, and pumped out again - it is highly efficient.  The windows are all double glazed and because we are surrounded by apartments we will have minimal heat loss and therefore minimal heating costs.

The double car park spaces (one above the other) are in the basement, and our section of the building is ten floors high, although not every part of the twin complex is the same height.  The architects won the design competition in 2003 and the building was opened in May last year.  The 118 apartments are serviced by around eight elevators. 

Our apartment has a floor space of 153sqm with a 13sqm balcony.  It's almost half the space of our deck in our Brisbane home, but it will be more than adequate.  Currently it is just a boring patterned grey concrete, but once we are in we'll look at having it tiled (I like the idea of slate, but we'll see).  When I lived in Nederlands before we had a French window to look out in the street when it was pleasant, and other than that nothing - even our windows were at either ground level or sloping in the ceiling, so we will have a space outside to escape to and enormous floor to ceiling windows to look out of - a complete contrast to how we lived here before.

Rene and I have already got a good idea where our furniture will go, and don't be surprised if it doesn't follow a similar pattern to our last home.  Now I'm getting excited!

This is the dune area nearby the apartments - Den Haag has the highest proportion of green space of any place in The Netherlands. The adjacent beaches are the most popular in Western Europe.