Amsterdam, Netherlands

As pleasant as the interior of my apartment may be (at least in my humble opinion), the exterior of the building and its structure have been not so dreamlike. The seller, who split the building into four apartments (including the coffeeshop on the ground floor) kept some serious flaws hidden from us when he sold each of us the apartments, and he has also not been paying his fair share for the coffeeshop (which he still owns) since July last year. A bit of a financial and legal nightmare.

The coffeeshop is an important source of revenue for him though because the rent on it is about 47,000 euros per year. Because officially it is not allowed to be there (since the splitting of the building into apartments) we, the people living on the other floors, were trying to use it as a means to get our money back ("give us what we are entitled to or we will proceed to close down the coffeeshop")... but that has come to an abrupt ending this week.

"Did you see?" my upstairs neighbour asked me as I was at his apartment this afternoon to be in a meeting with some officials from the city, "the coffeeshop is closed! The city closed it yesterday."

Well, I hadn't seen that. Turns out that the coffeeshop had had a supply of about 8 kilograms of cannabis for its trade with customers when only 0.5 kilograms of supply is tolerated by the city. Go over that limit, as they had done, and the city will close the business. So, coffeeshop Extase is no more and is likely never to reopen. That takes away our 'weapon' that we could use against the seller of our apartments... and because the city doesn't seem to be too helpful in getting our money back, it seems that we will have to find a compromise so that at least we can get some of our money back to our bank accounts. To be continued... The picture is of the closed coffeeshop in our building (with the scaffolding also still on one side of the building.