House hunting 1/2 - The dream & status check

Buying a house is a dream of many in this life. To some extent, this is also the case in our little family. To be able to sit out on the porch and put your toes in the uncut grass to feel bad about the downspout that you temporarily fixed with cable ties last fall - because you had to fix it by the weekend! Oh the feeling!

You yourself come from the country from a relatively large family, oh yes. there were cows around the corner. We lived in a big house with a living room bigger than my first 3 apartments combined and a lawn that for some reason always needed to be mowed yet looked like hell...

The lady, she easily dreams of that Swedish dream with the red house with white knots, a large home-grown garden, and being able to run barefoot (don't get any ideas now!) to the lake to take a dip in the moonlight.

We both see the freedom in being able to open the door and let the little ones out to run on their own, without having to fear if a car will come when they cross the road to the playground that we actually have right outside our current den.

https://www.australianmodeller.com.au/collections/structures/products/kibri-38840-swedish-house-red-ho-scale

But that is the Swedish idyll. Life in the country with the 3 Vna is the Swedish dream. Now we live in Germany upstairs, with slanted roofs, narrow windows and no balking. The idea is also that we will remain in Germany for a while to come. Then shouldn't it be part of the impossibility of finding a house that matches our wishes anyway?

So what is there really? Now you have to take a few things into consideration. We live in Northern Germany, so the selection is actually better than many parts in the south. We live fairly close to Hamburg, so the prices are a bit different then compared to if you moved another 30-40 minutes north-west. But in general, I can think that the supply is quite sparse if you say so. There are a few types of houses that match most in description.

The terraced house - Not a new concept right away and everyone probably knows the concept. The compressed accommodation where you can touch both "outer" walls of the house if you lie flat on the floor. But the houses here are probably further compressed than what we are used to in Sweden. More similar to the English terraced houses and would not surprise me if the influences come from each other or even from the same source.

The square meters reach up to a rough 75m2 and the plot about the same. If you are lucky, you will find a more extensive plot where you will get a garden of 2x40m. The layout is often the same. Kitchen and living room on the ground floor. Guest toilet, Bedroom 1 and Bedroom 2 upstairs. In the basement you often find the Master Bathroom and storage space where you can hide the laundry. This is provided that there are basements at all. Otherwise, that bathroom lands upstairs.

If you're lucky, you'll find somewhere with an extended attic where you can push a sleep-drunk teenager in in the future. Otherwise you have to make do with 3 RoK with maybe a basement then. The villa is sometimes connected to the local, if rare, district heating network, but often gas-heated.

Parhus

The semi-detached house - Better than a terraced house can be imagined anyway. However, there are huge similarities. The square meters maybe stretch up to somewhere around the 90s and the floor plan is largely the same. Kitchen and living room on the ground floor, but here they may have managed to squeeze in a guest toilet anyway.

Bedroom 1 and Bedroom 2 upstairs. The big difference is that you may have a larger veranda and a carport to roll the petrol guzzler in. How do you heat such a house then? Eco-friendly Germany of course uses the most nature-friendly options they can find. OIL! Probably Russian too..

Houses - Of course there are regular houses as well. Or for that matter sensible semi-detached houses as well. There are some problems with these.

1. They are worn down. Really run down. We are talking complete renovation of 90% of all that are outside.
   
   
2. 
   They are of course in the wrong part of Köping. That's fine if you live in a country with 10 times the population density.
   (SWE has 25prs/km2, GER has 238prs/km2)
   
   
3. The energy values are purely for wheat. How about a nice little energy value of almost 300kWh/m2? As taken! Isoerling is some new invention that they are just starting to understand with the energy crisis onno 2022.
   
   
4. They are damn expensive.
   
   
5. It is clear that you can find a state-of-the-art house with Energy Class C-D somewhere. Located somewhere not too far from any type of connection to the municipal road network. But you'll have to shell out quite a lot of money for that.

The houses are usually oil-heated as well. Sometimes gas or fully electric heated. Funnily enough, oil is the cheapest option (at the time of writing).

There is a lot of new production, but frankly the energy figures on these are also quite ridiculous and the prices even more so.

Up until 2019, newly built detached houses were required to meet EnEV 2016 standards, which meant that buildings could not have a primary energy consumption of more than 100 kWh/m² per year (between C-D that is).

From 1 November 2020, however, new standards apply according to EnEV 2018, which means that buildings must not have a primary energy consumption of more than 85 kWh/m² per year. Thus: C.

Many single-family houses manage to get around these values somewhat because they have solar cells that they can use to a fairly large extent. Then they get "free" heating of tap water, which is the most common type of solar cells here. But these newly built houses are with us in round piles around the equivalent of 6-7 thousand. Unfortunately out of our budget.

Germany is currently looking at a change in the law that will require more energy optimization and also laws to prohibit the new installation of non-renewable energy sources. This means new installation of gas and oil. These also include if you have to replace the existing heating system, which ipc everyone must do either yesterday or at least within 5 years. Which of course puts more pressure on the prices of the houses that actually already have environmentally friendly heating.

If we look at it honestly, it's not exactly a brilliant one. We don't talk about looking for that 5-hectare plot right away and don't consider ourselves particularly fussy either. A house with enough room for ourselves, 1 room for each of the kids and not having to stub my little toe every time I turn a corner. I personally don't mind a little renovation but maybe not blowing the whole house out.

Then we come to the financial question.. but we will deal with that next week!