If all else fails, just do it.

This was the mantra I told myself during the next sleepless nights.

there might be or might not be a bomb at the exact same spot where we intended to build a house. So far so bad. But what were we supposed to do?

A call at the city council assured us that the city did not under any circumstances intend  to buy the property back. And even if - we would have lost a fortune that we paid for taxes, notary costs and the bank's interests.

Sell the property to someone else? Well, that thought came to our minds... But who would buy land with a bomb? And could we look at ourselves in the mirror if we would sell the house to someone without mentioning the potential bomb? Certainly not.

So we decided to take action.
We needed to prepare the ground for any examination done by warfare agent disposal.
There was a lake to be pumped down and a duck family to be relocated. After that the topmost mud layer had to be removed by the underground engineers (who obviously wanted to be paid a horrendous extra charge due to the potential danger).

I could have never imagined that my first action building this house would be to stand into knee deep mud water - but there we went:

^^ This beautiful lake needed to vanish, so I put on my wellies, borrowed an electric pump (my nice neighbours allowed me to use their electricity... otherwise we would have had a huge problem) and got started. ^^

 ^^ Did I mention it was February and freezing cold? ^^

^^ I had to do some digging because after a while there were only smaller puddles left ^^

^^ Oh, if you ask yourself  "Why is she doing it all on her own?!" My husband laughed about my attempt to take my rubber boots. He thought I exaggerated. That small amount of mud... Well, after he took one step on the ground, he knew I wasn't so funny at all. He sank into the mud with his leather shoes faster than he could tell. So he took the part of the photographer and "advisor" ... ^^

^^ In the evening I felt much better. Nothing feels worse than doing nothing at all. ^^

The next day the warfare agent disposal checked out our property. I got the call, when I was at work in the middle of an arts class...

February 2015 - I'm a bomb and about to blow up

After we knew that we wouldn't get a power connection in the near future, we were devastated. How could we start building a house without electricity at the construction site?

In retrospective I should have laughed this problem away.
Because it was such a tiny problem in comparison to what was coming next.


We got a letter from the city's council that informed us that there might be a bomb on our newly purchased property.
A bomb.
An English world war II bomb most likely.

The letter furthermore informed us that we are politely asked to take some action to remove the bomb as soon as possible.

That's bad news.

Finding our how much it costs to have a bomb removed was even worse news.
The removal itself is paid for by the government, but everything else (the digging, the evacuation of the neighbours, the underground construction, etc.) have to be paid for by the owner of the property ... us.

I can't even tell how devastated and helpless I felt. We didn't even begin the building process and already had to spent all our savings for a stupid bomb.
Thanks a lot ancestors for starting redundant wars for stupid reasons and having your land bombed.


(Edit: I know worse things happened during the war and my bomb is  chicken-feed compared to the serious stuff... but in my recent situation this old unexploded bomb was my private catastrophe.)


I called the warfare agent disposal and explained my problem.
The man on the phone was not impressed at all and told me that there hasn't necessarily to be an actual bomb.
I just got a warning because after checking old aerial photos there was a metallic shadow on the land which we purchased. "It might be everything. An old armor, an old car, a pile of metal or a pile of bodies.... or a bomb. The photos are old, so we have to doublecheck."

Oh great. As if the knowledge of a pile of dead bodies underneath my house would be anyhow comforting.

We set a date for the bomb investigation which would only include a bit of digging and some technical sensor magic.  The disposal technician just had to check if there was some kind of massive metal in the underground (like in a bomb) or if the shadow on the photo was just ... well a shadow.


Needless to say that I didn't sleep a lot until the date of the investigation.

Long time no see

At first I was afraid, I was petrified....

No kidding, the last 10 months have been the most horrible ones in my life.

I now know some truths about building a house,

1) It sucks.

2) It's exhausting

3) It is always more expensive than expected.

4) It comes along with a huge number of sleepless nights, good and bad cries and some devastation.

5) It is not the best way of building a healthy marriage

But we survived. 

I survived.

We moved into the new house that we can finally call our home 4 weeks ago. 

It's the first time in a whole year that breathing and sleeping comes easyly. 

I am good. We've done it.

The reason there are so few blogs about the building process of a house is simple: 

Noone who takes actually part in the process of building has any time left for blogging after exhausting days on the construction site, frustrating conferences with the constrcutors or the bank or fights over bathroom tiles in the middle of a hardware store.

This blog has been dead for far too long.

I'm going to revive it and share the steps of building a house with you in retrospective.

I'm pretty sure I've lost all of my rare readers, but here we go. A new beginning in a new home.

Frequently asked question: Why didn't you just buy a house?

If you ever start fantasizing about having your own house, you have to ask you two very fundamental questions:

Question 1: Do I want to buy a house or do I want to build it?

Obviously there are pros and cons for both sides. Those who want to build their own house argue that they can choose the entire architecture of their future home. If you buy a house which has been standing there for quite a while, you are limited in your architectural decisions. You have to make a compromise on several topics.

But - and that's a huge but - buying a house, which is ready to be moved into, spares you a LOT of bullshit galore. You simple haven't to deal with constructors, surveyors, underground engineers, roofers, tilers and all these men which don't want to negotiate with you. Especially when you are a woman.
I've never experienced sexism before I started building a house, It's horrible and unfair. (I'll do a post about it lateron...)
And because my husband started working on a project in beautiful Vienna as soon as we started the building progress, I had to handle most of it on my own.

But back to homes that already existed:

We were close to buying two different houses. One was in my parents' neighbourhood. I would have loved to live in the area where I grew up myself. The garden was great, but the house was from the 1950s, the space was cozy, the windows were small, the roof needed a make-over and the house was designed for 2-3 post-war families. So there were 6 bedrooms, 2 kitchens and two bathrooms forced into 100 squaremetres. The rooms were small. If we had bought it, we would have had to remodel the whole floorplan, tear out most of the walls and put in some steel girders.
That sounded like a lot of extra work and we simply couldn't anticipate the costs for remodelling the house.

The second house we were close to buying, belongs to one of my colleagues who is going to move to Berlin next summer.
I love her house. It is from the early 1900 (1903 oder 1906 I think), it has high ceilings, huge windows, old wooden floors, and ist was remodelled in the 1990s.
I would have bought it immediately but my husband didn't want to.  He didn't like that it was a town house, between other town houses. And he didn't like that the ground floor was actually just a storage. Originally the ground floor had been the basement but due to road works the basements of the whole series of town houses were dug out. Thus you come into the house through the basement (which has a very low ceiling) and have to go upstairs to get into the living room and kitchen. Furthermore he didn't like that there was only one bathroom in the whole house. And it was on the third floor, one floor above the living area.
We could have installed a bathroom there somewhere but that would have been quite expensive and this house - as great as it was - was 40.000€ over our budget anyway.
I would have bought the house anyway. But I learned that marriage is about compromises.

I think it is pure luck if you find a house which you like a hundred percent, can afford and is located in a good neighborhood at the same time. I say it's nearly impossible, unless you have plenty of time to wait and look for the house of your dreams.


So you just have to decide for yourself if you are willing to make a huge compromise and invest a lot of money in a house that only slightly meets your expectations. 
Or if you are willing to put up with tons and tons of bullshit and sleepless nights and have time and energy to work on your house project at least 5 hours a day - next to your fulltime job - to eventually get a house which meets your preferences in every need.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I would choose, if I could turn back time and reconsider.

powerless

I'm not metaphorically speaking.
We are powerless. Literally.

I applied for a connection for power over 4 months ago.

The electricitiy company wrote a letter the day before yesterday to tell me that it's not going the simple way for us because there aren't enough power stations around our property. So we have to file for an early building connection which will be attached to our house lateron.

In the last sentence they informed us, that we need to assign them to install a connection for power 8 weeks before we want to start the building process. 8 weeks.

Fun fact: We want to start on Saturday. Yes, Saturday as in 3 days from now. 

What took the electircity company 4 freaking months to write a standard letter?
And why didn't our electrician even check the existance of a power source? He assured me that this early power connection wouldn't be a problem at all. He said it would take him less than 2 days to install a local power station for our building process. 
Even after I read the electricitiy company's letter to him, he said they were exaggerating. He will have a look.
Two hours later he called me again and said "Oh well yeah, they were right. There isn't a power source where I can plug in your connection box. Nothing doing!"

Inspire me! - model houses as a spring of inspiration

A great thing while trying to figure out how you want your future home to look, is getting some inspiration by having a look at model homes.
I don't know how it is anywhere else but in Germany those parks, where you can visit a whole neighborhood of - obviously unoccupied - model homes, are all over the place.


For our inspirational process we chose the model house park near our current residence..

I took plenty of pictures of facings, ground plans and even furniture.


But if you are really interested in those houses I recommend following this link. 

Get a tour through the park

You can get a tour through each and every house. Try it out. All these houses are truly awsome.

We've got the most inspiration in houses 3 and 19, because both of them include a garden room.



Another idea we took from those model houses was to cut out part of the ceiling in the childrens' rooms. Because we chose smaller rooms we have the possibility to add a ladder to the upper storey in the childrens' rooms and place a mattress on it.
The upper storey is not high enough to stand there, even for a child (the height up there is approximately 1,40 metres) but hey, children love caves and forts... don't they?

 

The start of something

We bought the property and went on with our daily routines.

But as time passed everyone was asking questions about what kind of house we were going to build. they wanted us to take a first step. And we wanted too. But we didn't know where to start.

How many storys should it have? How many bedrooms? Bathrooms? ("You want children, don't you?") What kind of roof? What kind of windows? What kind of entertainment system? Which kitchen supplies would we choose. 

Should it be really modern (lots of glass), all genuine and grown up (dark wooden floors and heavy couches), Scandinavian (and if we chose Scandinavian... would we stick to Scandinavian minimalism or go for the pastel shade - shabby chic kind of style?)

We were literally overwhelmed by thousands of pages of impressions and catalogues and ideas and questions and good advice. 

What helped us a lot was to take a little time out. Our honeymoon came in quite handy.

Somewhere between Bangkok and the most beautiful Thai islands we simply forgot that we had bought land and needed to build a house on it.

Sadly I had to realize that this perfect little bungalow of ours - with a bathroom without a roof and a massive rock in the middle of it - made perfect sense on Koh Tao... But it wouldn't in Suburbia.

Nevertheless I could figure out 3 things about my future home:

1) I want a big wooden porch.
2) I chose these shiny kitchen floor tiles for my bathroom (yes, i did. Maybe I should have consulted my friends first so they could talk me out of it...)
3) I want a LOT of windows in my livingroom/diningroom/kitchen ... 

I do get the gorgeous view over the ocean from my kitchen table into the bargain, right?

When we returned from our honeymoon, we sat down and started planning.

Soon we realized that we agreed in most of the important aspects-

We both wanted our house to be not too big. 

We wanted one proper storey and one half storey. 

But it should have a basement. 

We need 3 bedrooms (one with a walk-in closet) and 2 bathrooms in the upper storey. And the possibility to capture a fourth bedroom somewhere in the house, if we decide someday, that we will have more than 2 children. 

We want an open kitchen-livingroom-diningroom. But we don't want to see the mess we've made in the kitchen when we relax on the couch. So the ground plan of those 3 rooms must be shaped as an L.

And there should be a lot of light (and therefor windows).

My office has to be on the first floor, so I can throw my school bag in there right away, when I come home from work. 

And we both agreed that we wanted a very simple house with a basic layout. But there should be one eye catcher. We decided to blend in a sunroom into our big open kitchen-living-dining-room concept.