I have to admit, I am still house obsessed. Funny, I thought that becoming baby obsessed would help to relieve some of my house obsession, sadly, I now have two obsessions.
Last summer, we found a TV show called, "Unser Traum vom Haus" or in English, "Our Dream of a House," which follows 3 families per episode who are in some stage of acquiring their dream house. We started watching it before our house building began, and it ran until around September, so not too far into our project. Lots of people had lots of problems, and I remember being horrified. What if we had similar problems? I mean they had major problems- houses not completed, ground crumbling, people running out of money, and lots of fighting. At that point, I could only hope that this would not happen to us.
Well, tonight, I was flipping channels, and a new season of Unser Traum vom Haus has started. I eagerly watched the show, and quickly realized that I was watching it through much different lenses than those with which I watched the show last summer.
There were 3 couples tonight. The first couple was building a house with a company that was out of Poland. Boy did they have trouble. They were building a pre-fab house that was from a company that is entirely based in Poland. The date of the house building was continually put off by a few days here, and a few days there, and then, a bus hit one of the trucks carrying part of the house, and the roof was damaged. By the end of the one hour show, the house was one month behind schedule, and there was no word of when the house would be delivered.
Lesson= building with locally based business worked really well for us. Yeah, the electrician caused us some difficulty, but he is not as local as our builder or plumber. It was nice knowing that if we had a problem, or if we had a question, we could stop by and talk with the owner of the company.
The second couple built a pre-fab with a German company that produces in Poland. Everything worked really well for them, until they realized that their furniture did not fit in their living room.
Lesson= plan. This is one lesson that I would gladly pass along to anyone thinking of building their own home. Plan, plan, and when you think you've planned everything, check everything, plan again. We spent countless hours planning. Joern put all of the furniture in on his architecture program, and I hand drew everything, to scale, in on the house plans. But the good news is that through planning, you really can get your house as close to perfection as possible. One of the compliments we have heard more than once is that the house is full of thougthful details. It was only because of our planning that we were able to have thoughtful details.
The third couple purchased an existing home, that was super old, and wanted to renovate. The house was very cool, and had potential. The problems started though when they found out that the house required much more extensie work than they had realized. They moved into the house and were living in one room while renovating. They had no heat, no hot water. And then, they realized that they were running out of money.
Lesson= there were two lessons this time. The first lesson is to plan on living somewhere while you are building. This living problem is a major house-building problem in Germany. You are required to give so much advance notice of when you're leaving an apartment, that it is nearly impossible to smoothly leave a rental and move into your new-build. But, you need to plan an alternative living location. A nice thing about this country is that family and friends are usually more than accepting of you staying with them for a few weeks while your house is finished, but you still need to find somewhere to store your stuff. The second lesson is the money lesson. Expect to go over-budget, because no matter how hard you try, unexpected problems will come up and you will need extra money. Either you will need to take a little more money than necessary though your mortgage (your architect may need to "pad," the costs a bit to make this happen,) or have an extra stash of savings somewhere. The second option is usually more difficult because usually when people are building a house, the majority of their savings has gone into their down payment.
I found it very interesting to watch the show having had a year's worth of house building experience. Now that we're at the tail-end of it all, I have to say that it has been a fantastic adventure. I love walking into our house, of course while diverting my eyes from the tile in the powder room, it feels wonderful. When people give you complements, you are truly touched, knowing how much hard work we put into the house. I am looking forward to watching further episodes of my favorite house building show!
Welcome! Our Fall Home Tour
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