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.

Going public

I have dear friends. However they tend to reevaluate most of my decisions.
That's somehow their job and in the past it kept me from doing really stupid things which I considered great ideas at first. (I mean permanent waves? hello?! What a GREAT idea! No... Thanks for stopping me, friends.)

But the thing with the property was serious stuff. I want that. I want to build a house.
Okay, if I could choose, I wanted to build a house with a huge garden, nice neighbours and an own little jetty for my rubber boat in the center of Hamburg oder Amsterdam.
But that's something I can't afford and will never be able to afford, not matter how hard I save up. So I go for the next best thing.

I'm convinced and - even better - I'm not alone in this. My husband is convinced, too.
I don't want my friends to talk me out of it.

That's why I described our newest project in mere superlatives.

I talked about my very spontaneous awesome idea. Awesome! Madly awesome, but still!
We are going to move! Not in a flat, no no... we are too grown up for another tiny apartment. We are going bigger. We need space! We move into a house! A residence!

I painted vivid pictures of my personal library with its cozy armchair to read books on chilli fall days. Of course with a perfect little side table where I could place my glass of wine upon.
Finally a room for my sewing machine and all the fabrics. And in the basement I'm going to install a punching bag.
And just imagine the garden! I talked about my wooden porch where we could grill some steaks and sit and talk and mingle for a whole long mild summer evening until I saw the reflection of the sausages and burgers in their eyes and saw them taste the taste of icecold beer on their lips.

Me: And you know what the best part is? After the barbecue no one has to drive home because we have plenty of space for guests!

I got them.

Friends: You are going to do a house warming party, right We'll be there! Great that you go for something bigger... your apartement is tiny. And you are going to have children, aren't you? It's a great idea to rent a house!

Me: Well... We are not quite renting it. We want our own house.

The reaction was cautious
Friends: Well... yeah ... own something... I've heard of it recenty. Anyway, where is this dreamhouse?

Me: ahm... grmpf....hmpf... well...chrchr

My friends stared on their feet, avoiding eye contact. You could tell that they were really uncomfortable.

Friends: Oh. I see. .... Well, at least it's quite green there, isn't it? You are lacking the nature here in the city center, right? When do you move?

Me: Ah that's the point. We'll have to build the house before we move. Right now it's just 600 square metres of mud.

Friends (openly shocked): You WHAT?! Are you insane?!?!

Impressions

I would like to show how our property looks today (18 months after we've purchased the property and already did some digging... spoiler alert: it included the possibility of a bomb. But that's a story for another time.). 

It's green and muddy and a family of ducks is already living there... 

We've got a long way to go.

BTW: We've got the nicest neighbors! 

nightmares of financial ruin... or: an appointment at the bank

The day before our wedding I called Suburbia's building authorities and asked  bluntly if the property we were interested in was still available.

It was.

But - so the sound man at the other end of the line assured me - these properties were highly demanded. So if I wanted to buy it, I should hurry. He offered us two weeks to figure out our credit status. After that he wanted to put the property back on the market.

In the next 14 days I didn't sleep at all.

Matt and I sat down and tried to figure out our incomes, our fix expenses and our expenses for food, fun and luxury. We found out that we were quite good and that there was - at this point - a lot of money to be saved at the end of every month.

Then we started calculating. We compared several loans with different rates of interests, different depreciation rates always concerning different terms.

Every evening my head felt like it was about to explode.

I had several nightmares in the next nights. My favourite one started with digging a hole for the basement on our new property and ended in burrying myself alive in this same hole under tons of unpaid bills.

However we scheduled an appointment at a private bank with a loan counselor. This counselor told us that it would be the perfect time for lending huge amounts of money while the interests are low, the European Central Bank is struggeling and the economy doesnt't look like it's about to recover.

Loans are cheap right now.

While my in-laws still pay a loan with a 10 percent interest we are paying a 1,6% interest on our property. But to keep it real: We are financing the property with a really unstable EURIBOR-loan which basically means that the interest rate changes every 3 months (Many, many sleepless nights...) . The rate however changes only about 0.0x every 12 weeks and so far it only decreased.

We intend to choose a different type of loan when we are about to finance the whole package. Right now we only finance the property because there still is no house.

The bank counselor assured us that we are able to finance (under the conditions from mid-2013) a loan of 380.000-400.000 euros. Quite astonishing. And way more than we intend to borrow. (But you never know, right?)

Being at the fancy bank office for the first time I felt a trace of panic rising in my guts. We were about to do it. Changing our easy going, laid-back life of two 24-year olds, who were financially stable and not responsible for anything concerning our living situation to a place where we have hundreds of thousands euros of debts and a house to build.

Nevertheless we called Suburbia, told them that we were in and scheduled an appointment with a notary to buy the property.

Misery over Boredom

I think chose the misery.

Building a house is definately a way of avoiding boredom for a very, very long time.

When the boyfriend and I first considered the idea of buying or building a house we were in a very enthusiastic place.

We were three weeks away from our wedding day. We were used to taking big steps forward, always busy with the next big project on our minds.

We've just met 4 years ago, while I was in college and he did an apprenticeship. I was convinced that I was always going to live with at least 7 roommates in a huge two story flat, he was convinced that he was never going to marry.

6 months later we moved together into a tiny apartement and were crazy in love. I graduated from college and started my 2-year training as a teacher. We had to make ends meet, and our apartment wasn't fully furnished until 2014.

We intended to travel the world and started in Iceland. He proposed spontaneously (he didn't know he would ask me to marry him until 2 minutes before he finally popped the question.) on the most famous Icelandic glacier after 7 days of hiking.

A wedding to plan! We had a new project!

During the wedding planning he started a new and exciting job at a big consulting firm and I finally finished my teacher training and started a my first real teaching job at a Highschool. Suddenly the hectic of our everyday lives eased. We needed a new project.

When we found the estate weeks before our wedding day both of us felt relieved.

18 months and hundreds of sleeples nights later there still is no house. 
We are still in the process of planning. 
If I had known before what kind of mess I'd bring myself into... I'd have chosen the boredom.