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.