We Bought A House!
We did it! We bought a house in Denmark. It's all ours!
Summary:
We found a house we loved dearly - a huge old Danish farmhouse built in 1777 (and updated a bit, of course) with a thatched roof, big exposed beams, surrounded by farm fields and wildflowers, and right across the road from the biggest lake in Denmark. We signed a contract for it, but the deal fell through.
(We. Were. Devastated.)
We looked at a bunch of other places and finally found a house that we liked quite a lot in Helsingør. We made an offer, they countered, and we accepted their counter offer. We're moving in on October 15th!
<< end of summary >>
The long version:
Chapter 1: The Farmhouse (or The One That Got Away)
In October of 2024, Zac and I decided to go look at this big old farmhouse on Arresø, the largest lake in Denmark. It was on the outskirts of Hillerød in a little village of farm fields and wildflowers. It sat at the end of a birch tree-lined driveway with a cobblestone courtyard visible just through the carriage passage adorned with the farm's name: Vittenbjerggård. It had a charming thatched roof, tons of space for our records, big rooms for the kids, a gigantic bonus room, and all kinds of amazing little quirks. (I mean, what new-build house today would have a wall built over/around an immovable rock in the foundation?)
We had skipped past it a few times online because it was out of our price range and a little farther away from work and school than we cared to be, but when we decided to go see it in person, it stole our hearts. We felt instantly at home. We tried to tell ourselves it was impractical and that it was too far away from our support network and our daily lives, but we didn't care. That house captivated us and we had to have it.
The realtor said that the couple who owned it was Norwegian with four kids. He said the kids were losing their Norwegian and the family wanted to move back to Norway. First, Zac and I both have Norwegian ancestry, so that felt like a sign. We were also excited that foreigners owned it, because maybe they'd be more sympathetic to us and want to sell to us over someone else. I also thought it sounded perfect because we needed to be in our rental until the end of July 2025, and maybe the owners of our dream house would be open to a long take-over period so that their kids could finish the school year in Denmark before moving back to Norway. It seemed like it could work out very nicely, time-wise!
Zac and I daydreamed about the house, agonized over the cost, and tried to find something else we liked even a fraction as much, but we couldn't get it out of our heads. We went back in November to see if a second, more discerning look during a horrible rainstorm would sour us on the cozy farmhouse. Even the actively leaking roof didn't phase us very much. We just stood under the water dripping onto the bathroom floor around our feet from the ceiling and thought, "Well, that probably needs fixed."
We talked to a lawyer. (When you don't have a realtor of your own, you get a boligadvokat, or a house lawyer.) He told us we should have an inspector out to look at the roof, and be aware that the cost of a new thatched roof would be significant. We took an inspector out with us in January 2025, but he basically told us that he had never seen a house from that era in such great condition and that he would buy it. Of course, he checked out the damp insulation and ceiling materials from the leak and advised us to get that replaced, but overall, his advice was to move ahead.
At the end of January, we made an offer. The realtor who was selling the house was often confusing to talk with, and his statements sometimes contradicted each other, but we figured it was the language barrier. We tried to be patient. After all, he was being very kind doing business in English with us, right? All through January and February, we went back and forth with him. Every offer we made was instantly rejected (clearly before he even spoke to the sellers). We thought our offers were quite reasonable, and we even made multiple offers with different options on how to handle the roof based on how much we would pay. Nothing was good enough. We kept being pushed further and further out of our financial comfort zone, but the heart wants what it wants, and we kept bumping up our offer little by little.
Finally, in early March, we thought it was over. We said we absolutely couldn't go any higher, the realtor said no, and we were sad.
But as I indicated before, that wasn't the end of it!
He called me shortly afterward and said the sellers had agreed to the offer. I was pretty confused. Why suddenly were they okay with our offer that was clearly too low before? He explained that he was leaving Real Estate Company 1 to start Real Estate Company 2 with a colleague. As I understood it, he was leaving immediately, but Company 1 was going to let him keep the commission if he closed the deal quickly since he already had a buyer and a seller in communications. He said he offered to take the difference between the seller's desired price and our offer out of his commission to complete the deal.
We were freaking thrilled! Well, I think I was more thrilled than Zac because he was all (responsibly) worried about money, but I knew how adaptable we could be with our budgeting (and that we could stand to drink less of our grocery money), so I was celebrating for sure.
At this point, the realtor more or less checked out completely. He was pretty unresponsive and we weren't really sure how to move forward. Eventually, we got an electronic contract to sign - about 40 pages, all in Danish, of course. It came with about 38 other documents covering everything from previous property divisions of the land to current electrical bills. I about killed myself translating it all and trying to figure out the relevance of everything, but I did it!
There were some issues with the contract, and it felt wrong right from the start. Some sections weren't filled in. There were boxes where something about our need for permission from the Ministry of Justice was supposed to be checked, and it was just blank. My name was spelled wrong, our current address was incorrect...it was all kind of weird. I sent a copy to the lawyer and asked to chat with him about it. Basically, he said all of that stuff should be properly fixed and filled in and I could just tell the real estate agent to correct it before we sign. We got an updated contract with my proper name and address. The check boxes were still not filled in, but we got the green light from the lawyer, so I let it go, we signed electronically, and we rejoiced again.
As immigrants who do not have permanent residency here, we have to apply to the Ministry of Justice (Justitsministeriet, Civilstyrelsen) if we want to buy property. We submitted our applications to the Ministry, along with our newly signed contract, and prepared to wait.
Weirdly, a new contract popped up in my inbox a day or two later. I didn't understand why we had to sign again, so I combed through all that Danish until I found what had been added: a little clause saying the contract would be void if the sellers were unable to purchase a property they were trying to buy.
This was an odd development. We had been told the sellers were moving back to Norway, and now they were buying a house in the same town closer to the city center. I looked up the house they were buying and saw it was removed from the public listing because a purchase agreement had been signed. So good news, I thought, because if they already have a contract for that house, it's likely it will go through, especially since they have a buyer for their existing house (us).
We re-signed the contract. The sellers were going to re-thatch the leaky side of the roof, so we took Friday off to go do a drive-by and see what a house-thatching looks like from the road. We planned to do a little drive-by, and then find the nearby forest path to figure out where we would soon be going for our evening walks. As we entered the forest, I got a devastating email. It was from our lawyer. He wrote that the seller's condition regarding purchasing the other house was not going to be met and that the contract would be cancelled by the end of the day.
We were shocked and very confused. We immediately wrote back to see if there was a way to stop it, but there was nothing we could do. Just like that, it was gone! We didn't even understand what had happened! Surely, if the contract they had was not finalized and another buyer came along, they would get first rights to meet the conditions, right? And shouldn't they have more than a few hours to do that?
We had a lot of questions and no one to answer them. I reached out to the new realtor at Real Estate Company 1 who was helping the old realtor finish out the deal. I asked what our next step should be, but he didn't understand my question.
"There is no next step. The house is off the market. It's no longer for sale."
"Of course it's not for sale - we were just buying it and it fell through. Do they still want to sell their house? We still want to buy it."
"I can reach out and ask them."
"When should I expect to hear back?"
"They are obviously very sad about losing the house they wanted, so I don't want to bother them right away. Maybe within the next week."
I didn't hear from him for a week, and I followed up via email. He ignored me for a while and then wrote to say he had tried to reach them but gotten no reply. And that was the end of my communication with Realtor 2.
But that's still not the end!! (Are you exhausted and regretting your decision to read the long version now? You can stop any time.)
Chapter 2: Realtor vs. Realtor - Fight!
I made a last-ditch effort to get some answers. I pulled the seller's email off the now-void contract and emailed them. I told them I wasn't sure if it was OK that I was reaching out or not, but that we felt like we needed some closure - some understanding about what happened and what went wrong. I told them that our communication with the real estate agency had been less than helpful, and that if they still wanted to sell, we still wanted to buy.
Three days later, I got an email from them - a very confusing email, because it was almost exactly the email that I had written! They said they weren't sure if it was OK that they were reaching out to me, but that they had taken my email address from the realtor's email (where he accidentally forwarded them one of our emails) because they felt that they needed some closure. They were confused about what happened, they felt the realtors were not helpful or easy to get in touch with, and they wanted our help sorting out what happened.
I replied instantly and told them I had sent the same email three days prior! (They found it in the spam folder.) We agreed to meet and go through our stories to get to the bottom of all the weird shit that happened.
By this time, it was the end of April. We arrived at the house we loved with a citronkage from Farumhus, the owners made coffee, and we sat in their lovely living room, strangers connected by a totally nonsensical experience. We started chatting and discovered that we were both told different reasons for the cancellation of the contract!
The realtor told them that the contract was cancelled because our lawyer had too many things he wanted added to the contract and they could not address all of them in time.
We were told that it was cancelled because the sellers lost the house they were trying to buy. Also, our lawyer hadn't even met with us to go over the signed contract yet, so there's no way the reason they got could have been true...
As best we can figure out:
- Realtor 1 made up the story about the sellers moving back to Norway. Of course, this is inconsequential, but it's a weird thing to lie about. They also did not have four kids, they have three. All of them were born in Denmark and they have never thought about moving back to Norway. I guess he was just trying to sell a house, and apparently, he never considered that the buyer and seller might speak to each other.
- Realtor 1 was confusing to talk to in English and Danish. (Thank goodness it wasn't just us.) He was a bad communicator. We were all confused, all the time.
- Realtor 1 decided to leave Real Estate Company 1 to make his own company. When he left, Realtor 2 had to step in to help. It seems like the two realtors were supposed to split the commission. It seems like Realtor 2 was upset with Realtor 1, possibly due to the extra work he was doing for very little payout. He really hated him. We think that when Realtor 2 figured out that he had to split a lower-than-standard commission, he didn't get any happier.
- The house that the sellers were trying to buy was also being sold by Realtor 1. Realtor 2 had to step in on that sale as well, but again, he was doing all the work. We think Realtor 2 didn't want to split any commissions with Realtor 1.
- To avoid this, Realtor 2 found another buyer for the house the sellers wanted to buy. It's totally allowed for another buyer to come in and swoop the contract as long as the contract isn't signed by both parties, but it was my understanding that they already had a contract signed by both parties, so I'm really unclear about how another buyer came in and was able to take the house in the span of a single day at the exact same purchase price. Shady.
- Realtor 2 appears to have found a buyer on his own, on a listing that was now his, for which he then got the full commission. Based on talking to lawyers and other realtors, it sounds like he could have given our sellers an opportunity to extend their deadline for closing the contract and securing it for themselves, but he did not give them the option to extend the timeline. As we understand it, this would have been common practice. It feels like he acted unethically to spite Realtor 1 and serve his own purposes.
- When Realtor 2 brought in a new buyer for the house our sellers were trying to get, they couldn't buy it anymore, which meant they didn't fulfill their clause in our contract (a clause they didn't even know had been added, I think), and it effectively cancelled our contract. So our sellers not only lost the house they were trying to buy, but we lost the house we were trying to buy by default.
And there you have it. We got stuck in the middle of a petty realtor fight and some unethical business practices. We have co-initiated a complaint. No word on that yet.
Fortunately, our rental agreement got extended to the end of December 2025, so we had some breathing room (as it was now the end of April 2025). We just continued looking at houses, browsing the new listings, and hoping something else would grab our attention like the farmhouse did.
The sellers continued to look for a place to buy, and we hung onto the hope they would do it by August 2025 so that we could still buy their house. We had agreed to still go through with the sale if it worked out, albeit without the help of a real estate company, using the offer that we had agreed upon previously.
Chapter 3: August Has Arrived
We looked at so many houses. Seriously. It was our hobby. When we thought a house had potential, we would schedule a viewing. Sometimes the kids came with us, and sometimes they stayed at home. They were kind of tired of it all, I think.
In the last two years, we have been to around 30 different viewing appointments. Every night after the kids would go to bed, Zac and I would get on the computer to look at our pre-set filtered results on Boliga.dk to see if any new listings had popped up during the day. Mostly, we'd just see them and sigh. It's not like we were being picky about location or anything. We were looking for anything with at least four bedrooms between the tippy-top of Nordsjælland to the north of Copenhagen that was remotely in our price range.
There were so many houses, but they were just that. Houses. They weren't homes. They weren't our home. We knew we had a deadline, but I was being a little pouty because nothing was as good as the farmhouse, and Zac was being bravely super optimistic for the both of us. I had a hard time hiding my feelings. We'd visit them and both try to say only positive things, picking out the features we actually liked and ignoring the parts we disliked.
This one is so close to work and school!
There's so much light in the kitchen.
This annex could be nice as a guest house or a gym.
The neighborhood is really lush and lovely.
The size of these bedrooms is incredible!
It would be fun to have a forest in your backyard.
This house has been really well taken care of.
It looks like Snow White's cottage in the woods!
We would be so close to the ocean - it has a private bathing bridge!
But what we weren't saying was that we were less than excited about any of them.
Maybe there were no good windows, or there were good windows but they looked right into a neighbor's house. Or the roof was crumbling and full of asbestos. Or we'd need to build a wall to give Harrison a bedroom. Or Harrison's bedroom could only be accessed by walking through Kaden's bedroom. Or the freeway was on the other side of the garden. Or the heating was a pellet stove, or worse, an oil furnace. We just wanted something as good as the farmhouse we almost had before, but it was looking more and more like we weren't going to find anything we love, we probably weren't even going to find something we liked, and we would have to settle for something that just worked.
I emailed the owners of the farmhouse one more time to see if they had perhaps found another place to live and forgotten to tell us about it. No answer.
But then we visited a little blue house in Helsingør. The old part of the house was charming and well-built in the early 1920s. The 2016 add-on was spacious and modern with cool bedrooms for all the kids. There was room for visitors, a nice garden with mature plants, and easy access to public transit. There was space for a batting cage, a good roof, and no major findings on the conditions report or the electrical report. We liked it. We didn't love it immediately, but as it simmered in the back of our minds (and as we continued to visit more houses that didn't appeal to us at all), we were struck by the desire to go back and look at it again. Something about it stayed with us.
When we went back, it just felt right, and all of us were in agreement. The kids immediately agreed on who would get each room. Zac and I asked some questions and chatted with the substitute realtor (the selling realtor was on holiday). We walked around and envisioned things. We listened to the traffic. We stood on the terrace and looked out at the garden. We felt the solid old wood floors upstairs. We figured out where to put the record player. We talked about some future updates we might like to do. But most importantly, we crossed paths with some people from Copenhagen hoping to sell their apartment and buy the house.
How could they do that when it was our house?! We got in the car pretty resolved to purchase it ourselves. The neighbors waved to us from their driveway.
We did debate about making an offer. It was still possible that the owners of the farmhouse would find a place to live and reach out to us to buy their lovely home! But we were now literally counting the days. We had to be out of our rental by the end of December. For safe timing, you should take over the new house a month before you have to be out of the old one so you have time to sand floors and paint and all that. So essentially, we needed to take over our new home by the end of November, or mid-November if we want to deduct two weeks of time due to Christmas. It can take three months to settle on a contract, go through the steps, and get the keys, which meant we should make a deal by mid-August, and we knew it. We also knew that the last deal we tried to make had taken significantly longer than three months (even though everyone we talked to told us how completely unusual that experience was).
We agreed we couldn't afford to keep waiting.
We made an offer, hoping that even if it were a little below asking price that it would be the superior offer due to our flexibility on timeline. The sellers wanted a quick take-over, apparently, so we thought it probably wasn't very appealing to them if the other potential buyers had to first sell an apartment before they could close the contract. The selling realtor returned with a counter offer from the seller the next day. We accepted and asked for a few of their yard tools. They agreed. It was all so simple compared to the last experience!
Two days later, the purchase agreement was ready for signature. We asked for a quick amendment, it was made same-day, and we all signed!
TWO DAYS LATER, I GOT AN EMAIL FROM THE OWNER OF THE FARMHOUSE. She said they hadn't found anything worthy of an offer, but that they were looking at a house later that week, and they'd keep us posted.
Zac and I had a brief moment of doubt. We had four more days to back out of our contract using the "buyer's remorse" clause. Should we back out of the plans we were making on the off chance that our farmhouse couple love the house they look at and immediately want to set the wheels in motion for the sale of the farmhouse to us? Or should we stay the course and honor our contract because it was a safer and more sure bet?
Such agony. I couldn't even bring myself to respond to the farmhouse owners. I knew it was not polite to just sit on the email, but I just couldn't decide what to do, and thus, I did nothing.
Eventually, Zac and I agreed to let go of the charming old farmhouse. Oh, what could have been...
On the other hand, the more we thought about our little blue house in Helsingør, the more we loved it. There were a lot of advantages. We would have colleagues and classmates nearby in the same town. Helsingør has a little music scene and a huge famous castle. The harbor looks over to Sweden, and there is a ferry you can easily take across. There are good restaurants and a lively atmosphere. It's a much more responsible choice of home (with a much cheaper roof to insure), and instead of being on the edge of an ultra-polluted lake that you can't swim in, it's on the edge of the salty sea, which is totally swimmable. OK, it's not on the edge, per se, but it's like a 7-minute bike ride to the edge.
I started doing my homework. I followed Instagram pages from local organizations and businesses so I could start getting a feel for what's going on in town. Vibe and Amanda and I took a little trip up there and walked around the neighborhood. We had a beer at the wharf and saw the final moments of a classic car show. We looked at Kronborg in the distance, always a lovely sight. I checked out the public school (just in case) and the international højskole. I read articles on the history of the property from which our little property had been parceled out from. We talked about where to get haircuts and which doctors to transfer to. Our excitement was pretty palpable.
Of course, all of this depended on approval from the bank and approval from the Danish Ministry of Justice. The bank was easy - this house was cheaper than the last one we tried to buy, and we make a little more money now. It was way more in our comfort zone than the last one. The Ministry of Justice was a little trickier. I contacted them and asked if our previous approval was valid for this house, too, if we just changed the address and sent them the new sales sheet.
Nope.
Zac and I reapplied with the Ministry as soon as we had agreed on the purchase price, but that meant another four weeks of waiting. Would the owners go for that? I mean, obviously, they did, and we just wrote into the contract that everything would be void if we didn't get approval by 15 September, but I was stressed as heck. I mean, everyone, including our lawyer, said it would be very unusual for them to not approve us since we were approved before, but it still wasn't certain.
The last time we applied, we got a case number assigned the day after we submitted our applications. Now, two weeks after we submitted our new application, we still didn't have a case number! I emailed the Ministry and we got a case number the next day. The biggest surprise came when we had full approval just five days later!
That approval was the last piece of the puzzle. Things happened really quickly once we got the letter. Within an hour, Zac and I had final loan papers to sign with the bank, an email from the lawyer's office discussing our next steps for deed registration, and a congratulatory email from the real estate office with a video to share on social media:
We have now met the wonderful current owners and started a paper count-down chain to the day we get the keys to our new Danish home!
* * *
And do you want to hear something funny? I got an email from the farmhouse owners a week after they were supposed to look at the potential house she mentioned in the email I didn't answer. They said the house they looked at, unfortunately, was not for them, but they were happy to hear we had purchased another home.
Wait...what?! How did they know that?!
As it turns out, the owners of the house we loved first are good friends with the owners of the house we loved second. What a strange and lovely coincidence.
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