In this video, I talk about my move. I was absent for 1 month on the channel because I was busy with my move. I took this opportunity to make a video with words and expressions in French related to this theme.

Transcript of the video

Hello to all of you. I hope you are well. First of all, I wish you a beautiful year 2021. I wish you all happiness and success in everything you do. It's been a few weeks since I last posted a video. If you are subscribed to the channel, you may have received my message where I explained that I was moving. Thank you very much for your messages of happiness. Today, the theme of the video is going to be about moving.

Some of you have written to me asking me to make a video on this topic, because there are many vocabulary words that could be interesting for you, many expressions. Indeed, either to talk about this topic in French, or if you want to move to France. If you are planning to move to a French-speaking country, a country where French is spoken, it might be interesting for you to know more about these vocabulary words on the topic of moving and real estate in general.

This was the case for Hugo, for example, who posted this comment asking me to make a video on this subject. Before starting, think about activating the subtitles, it will be easier for you to understand the video and especially to see the words written in French, the expressions written in French, you will remember them better. If you are new on the channel, think about subscribing to see all the videos.

This video will be divided into four parts. The first part will be devoted to the search for an apartment or a house, the search for a house. The second part will be devoted to moving.

The third part will be devoted to the move-in and the fourth to the fitting out.

Already, I have used three words that are very similar. Maybe you haven't even heard the difference: there was the word move, move-in and move-out. I will start by explaining these words and the difference between these words that are very close. Moving and the verb to move, I'm moving, you're moving, he's moving, etc., it means that we leave a home, we leave an apartment, a house to go to a new house or a new apartment. For example I can say I'm moving on Saturday, I have to pack all my boxes and give my keys to the owner of the apartment.

So, you leave one apartment to go to another. The second word was moving in or moving somewhere. Once you've moved, you're going to move into a new apartment. So that's arriving in a new place. For example, I can say I just moved into a new house in the south of France. And finally, the third word is the fitting out with the verb "to fit out". When you move somewhere, you arrange the spaces. So, it means to organize a room. It's the way we arrange the furniture. For example, I can say: in my new apartment, I arranged an office corner in my living room. I reserved a small space in my living room where I installed a small table, a chair to work, I arranged the space.

Now that we have seen these three vocabulary words that will come up many times in the video, let's start with part 1: finding an apartment or a house. Let's start with the different names in French for housing where you can live. You can live in an apartment. An apartment is when you live in a building where there are different houses. So, you don't live in the whole building, you live in a part of the building. There are different kinds of apartments. There are studios. If I live in a studio, I live in an apartment which has only one room, the studios, it is generally very small. For example, we will have a very small kitchen, we will perhaps have a sofa bed. It's a sofa that unfolds to make a bed. So, it's a small space. Our apartment can also be a duplex. When we live in a duplex, again, it's an apartment in a shared building. But in our apartment, there will be stairs and a floor. In France, and I specify in France because it is not the case in all the French-speaking countries, in all the countries where they speak French, we speak about T2, T3, T4, T5 to speak about apartments. It is interesting for you, if you are planning to come and live in France and you are looking for an apartment because it is a rather particular way of counting. In fact, a T2 means an apartment with one bedroom. So we assume that there is always a bathroom and a kitchen. And why we say 2 because there is a living room and a bedroom. For example a T3 will be an apartment with a living room and two bedrooms. Then, of course, there is the house. When you live in a house, it means that you occupy the whole space, the whole building. We don't share. With my partner we were tenants of an apartment. When you are a tenant, it means that every month you pay rent to a landlord, the owner of the apartment. We have a lease. The lease in French, it is the name of the contract that we are going to sign with a landlord when we occupy an apartment. We decided together to become owners ourselves, so we wanted to buy an apartment of our own and not to be tenants anymore. In French, we say when we are tenants, we rent an apartment or I rent a house, we rent a house. We were looking for a T3. As I told you, a T3 is an apartment with a living room and two bedrooms. To find our apartment, we decided to go to real estate agencies. A real estate agency in French is the place where the owners put for sale or rent an apartment, a house, a studio, etc.

We went to see real estate agents. A real estate agent is the person who works in a real estate agency. They are the people who show you apartments, who help you to sell an apartment, to rent it or to buy it. We have made, with real estate agents, many visits of apartments.

In French, the expression to say that we are going to see an apartment to rent or to buy it, is the expression "visiter un appartement" or "visiter une maison". Generally, when we want to buy or rent an apartment through an agency, when a real estate agent helps us, we have to pay him what we call agency fees. In France, there are also websites to sell apartments or rent apartments. These are sites that can be used by individuals, between them. The individuals are people like you and me. They are not professionals. These sites are for example Leboncoin or PAP. This will allow, for example, to save money, therefore not having to pay the famous agency fees. We, for example, found our apartment on an Internet site. Once we found the apartment, we had to go to the bank to get a mortgage. A real estate loan is when you borrow money from the bank to be able to buy the apartment, to pay for this apartment. There are several expressions in French that mean the same thing, that mean a mortgage. We can say I make a loan, we can say a real estate loan or a real estate credit.

It is that we ask the bank for money to be able to buy our apartment or our house. Once you have your real estate credit, you get your loan, so, we say get a loan, get a credit, it means that the bank lends us the money.

We go before a notary. In French, the notary is the person who will conclude the purchase between the seller and us.

Let's move on to part 2. The move. When we move, we have to pack what we call boxes. We will put all our things in cardboard boxes. To protect the most fragile things, for example the dishes, we will use what we call bubble wrap. Bubble wrap is transparent plastic paper with small balls that are slightly inflated to protect them. What we use to close the boxes is called scotch tape, it allows to close the boxes. When you move from an apartment where you were a tenant. We were tenants, we did the cleaning, we cleaned everything before the inventory of fixtures. The inventory of fixtures in French is an expression that we use to talk about the moment when the owner is going to come, and we are going to look at the whole apartment, to see if everything is in order, nothing is broken. The deposit in French is the amount of money that you give to a landlord when you enter an apartment. He will keep it if ever, for example, something is broken. Once all the boxes are done, it's time to move all the boxes, all our stuff, all the furniture. Generally, when we move, we use a van, a small truck or a moving truck.

If you have a lot of stuff or if you don't want to carry it all yourself, you can hire movers. These are people whose job is to carry all your boxes and furniture to your new apartment. When we move, we can also ask friends to help us carry all the boxes. Let's move on to part 3: moving in. Time to move into the new apartment. Once we had removed all our stuff, all our boxes from our old apartment, it was time to move into our new home.

In French, we can say, it's "notre chez nous" or it's "mon chez moi", it means the place where you live. Fortunately, there is an elevator. If you have to carry all the furniture, all the boxes up the stairs, it can be very difficult, especially for us, because we live on the fifth floor. If you have to carry all the boxes and furniture, for example a fridge, a bed, a sofa up the stairs, it can be very complicated. Once the furniture and boxes were in the apartment, we had to live in the boxes for a few days.

You may have heard the expression, living out of boxes. It means that you've just moved in, but you don't have all the furniture you need to start unpacking and putting away the things that are in the boxes. So, all around us, there are the boxes. So we stay a few days like that living in the boxes. Let's move on to part 4, the furnishing. Once we have moved and we have moved into the new apartment, once we have got the keys, we now have to organize the apartment, organize the space. Before, we lived in a smaller apartment, so we were short on furniture. As we moved into a larger apartment, we needed new, more furniture. So we had to have that furniture delivered. To deliver means that we order for example on the Internet and that people bring us the furniture. Once we received all this furniture, we had to assemble it. The expression in French to assemble a piece of furniture, it means to build it. For example, we assembled this bookcase. It arrived, there were boards, screws and we had to assemble it. When we assemble furniture, we use different tools, such as a screwdriver, a screwdriver or a hammer.

We arranged the different rooms with our old furniture and our new furniture. We did the decoration, for example, we repainted the walls, they said repaint because the walls were already painted, but we wanted to change the color. When painting walls, we usually have to use a brush, a roller and, of course, paint.

Now that our apartment is fully furnished, that we have almost finished decorating, I will have more time to make new videos. I already hope that you enjoyed this video, that you were able to learn some new vocabulary. And that you are super motivated to continue learning French, to improve your French in 2021. If you liked this video, think about putting a like and if you are new, think about subscribing so you don't miss any video.

See you soon.