Diary of a house build near Munich

Following on from a previous thread question here: Building your own house in/near Munich

I am building a house over here, and work started yesterday. Thought I would just post any thoughts/problems/issues etc for others that might be considering this route.

PLOTS:
We were lucky that our in-laws purchased this plot back when dinosaurs still roamed freely. But seems that plot costs are much cheaper here in the "home counties" around Munich than back home in the UK. I would say maybe 30-40% of the equivalent plot back home, plus much easier to find. This makes building a more attractive proposition. In some villages you can buy cheaper if you have relatives already living there.

HOUSE DESIGNS:
You must go to http://www.bauzentrum-poing.de/ if even considering a self-build. It is a great place to see 60+ house designs all in one place. Even if you are building 100% your own designs you will get lots of information and ideas.

ARCHITECT:
We spoke to 3-4 architects, and finally selected a guy on recommendation. He also does lots of big commercial stuff, and has good builder contacts. They have too many architects in this country, so they are keen generally for work. We are using him to "project manage" as well as design. The idea is that we will still save money this way because he will get us better quotes, and ensure the builder does not cut corners or rip us off etc.

THE DESIGN:
As this is one of the last houses to be built in the road, we are restricted slightly on planning. There are rules that dictate we can build only a ground and 1st floor building to a certain height, angle of the roof, tile colours etc. So no funky inverted curved roof design on this one! But will still be modern looking hopefully. It got a bit tedious at some stages when they want to know EXACTLY where every plug and light switch is going etc.

BUILDERS:
The architect is doing each stage on a contract-by-contract basis. First part is the "Rohbau" which visually is the main part of the game up to roof level, although only actually accounts for about 1/3rd of the budget. And of course being in Germany we will have a big cellar floor which is more unusual back home. Based on the architect spec we got 3 quotes via the architect and 2 independently. The architect quotes were the best, so we have more confidence in him.

TIMINGS:
We only agreed the "Rohbau" builder about 2 weeks ago. I think my wife mentioned they would start this week, which I figured meant sometime in October. Drove past the plot this morning and they started yesterday!!! Not paid builders or architect a penny to date which is nice. We started on this in around February but has been a pretty relaxed pace, it could be done in 6-8 weeks for sure.

LOCAL PLANNING:
A pleasure to deal with but helps that we have family in the village probably. They have caused no issues, been helpful, approved all plans quickly etc. We needed to get neighbours to sign the plans, but that was also easy 'cos they would prefer a house on the plot (rather than the ponies they had before).

If anyone has any questions that I can help with then please PM. Otherwise I will post occasionally with any updates or dramas etc.

Photos from this morning, showing yesterdays start:

just being nosy, but it would be interesting to know the costs of this project - your exectations now - and how it ends up :-)

Hey JE - where(what town) are you building in? We had planned to build something (once we found a nice chunk of land) but then we found the absolute perfect house (only 4 years old and not at all 'German' - open floor plan, all stainless steel kitchen with top of the line appliances (Poggenpohl and Gaggenau) plus 3.5 bathrooms - everything my boyfriend wanted - nothing that I cared too much about - I'd never heard of Poggenpohl or Gaggenau before). But, beforehand, we also went to the Bauzentrum in Poing and decided that we wanted a BauFritz 'fertig' house. They have a great reputation and good quality building materials. Plus, before we even committed to them, they sent a guy to us who looked at every piece of property that we considered and told us the pros and cons of each.

Since we've moved into our new place, the neighbors are starting to build their new house (on their current piece of property) and needed our signatures on their plan etc. The local authorities are very, very picky about stuff (roof angle, color of the roof, etc).

We are so happy that we didn't build (or we would probably be divorced by now!!).

But, good luck and keep us posted (with piccies).

I am not "expecting" any major marital dramas to be honest. We have decided that this is my wife's project. I always handled property stuff in the UK, but she has more time (and to be honest more interest) in this one, plus of course much better German skills. So she gets final say on any issues. Has been no dramas getting to this stage.

Budget? Looks around the €360,000 mark currently I think, but no doubt this will drift up 10% magically. I am quite relaxed about it 'cos the land cost us nothing, and it's still loads cheaper than living in the UK. We are building traditional bricks, and the 65sq metre garage (with cellar also under) bumps up the costs. You could do a "finished house" I think for €250,000 at the same basic size, with a smaller garage and cellar.

HEATING:
Nearly forgot! This was quite a subject. We wanted gas, but whilst this is in the village now they refused to run to the house as was gonna cost €38,000 for the pipe down the street. So we were close to going with the new Warmepumpe system that sucks heat out the ground and uses an exchanger. Not that much cheaper as the electricity bills to run the pump are there, not so controllable, and it costs a lot more to install. Did not want oil 'cos it stinks, and needs major storage space. Considered wood chips briefly. But then gas board suddenly agreed to lay the pipe last month! Plus we are getting some system that automatically exchanges all the air in the house every 4 hours for fresh (and also connected so we can cool the air in summer).

Sounds fantastic JE - I shall confidently look forward to an invite to your house warming so I can be sick in your €100,000 cellar

Good luck with it all.

Thanks Jimbo. The idea is indeed that it will be very welcome for guests, 'cos living out here in the sticks I rely on them!!!

As you can all guess my priorities on the project so far have been:

Garage big enough for 3 cars and 2 motorbikes - check

Huge boys room in the cellar for gym kit, pool table, plasma TV - check

House wired throughout for networked stereos and X-boxes - check

Study for me to surf porn and pretend to be working from home - check

Needless to say I am relying on our very own "Grinner" to advise and make sure I can watch telly, adjust the stereo, and nuke some aliens whilst having a dump.

I think the wife mentioned there might be a kitchen and bathrooms included but details are pretty sketchy from memory and I would need to check on the plans again.

We also have this Siemens Warme Pump thingie. I still don't know how it works - should I be concerned about that? It's supposed to be cheaper in the long run...

Too funny about your wife having final say. The couple that built our house - she controlled everything but he had the final say on the kitchen (he is the chef) - and the house just fit us because, like her, I wanted nothing to do with the kitchen!

will you have much of a garden/yard?
you can't build a house with that kind of money in the u.k.? gee, how expensive is that island!

I think you should lblog it. Interesting. Put the pics on Flickr then reference them via the blog. Would follow it often

Plot is 1200 sq meters so will get enough "yard" I think. Footprint of the house and garage cannot be more than 180 sq metres I guess. I think build costs are indeed cheaper here, as well as the land. I am also rather hoping that the quality will be better!!! Most UK builders trade under the name "Bodgett & Leggett"

Jeremy - this is my blog!

I see a TT house warming coming up in the cellar, which will add another 10% to the project costs at least,

good luck, keep us informed as to what goes on

Best of luck, JE. Make sure your contractor doesn't go bust, and don't be too generous with down-payments. Have independent witnesses present at any Zwischenabnahme etc. taking down what everyone says, and ask all parties to sign the minutes.

*WOO WOO WOO DINNG BZZZZZZ*

Sorry, that was my lawyer alert going off there...

Good guess, jimbo. But wrong.

@JE - Can we get a status update on the construction? Any new probems, situations or pics?

Well, it slowed down for about 10 days after they kinda did that drastic grass mowing! They needed some bit of non-issued paperwork from the Landrasamt. Kinda worried it might be like English builders - start the job and then shove off to another site.

However the digger started yesterday morning and we now have an enormous completed hole. Weather is good so I expect serious changes in the next week.

We are having the predicable mini-panics about the size of the house. When you see it pegged out in the ground it can seem too big from a distance, then when you stand inside the lines it all seems too small. I have been warned by the architect it gets deceiving. Currently with the big hole it looks like we are building a factory for zeppelins. Wife is flapping now about whether the dining area is big enough...she keeps measuring tables, and plotting out areas in our current house.

We also had a quick flap as to whether the house sits too far back or forwards on the plot. Although there is a building line, this is being dictated by the large garage that goes to the rear of the house. So it kinda sits in the middle of the plot. Direction of the plot is basically 100% wrong - front of the house faces South, but we should get sun over the roof and to the side hopefully. Garden privacy seems not such an issue as in the UK, so we can also use the front - it is a very quiet street.

Our current dull question - for which someone might have a valid opinion is:

Do we get one of these over-the-top-blow-the-doors-off €2,000 (what!!!) built-in coffee machines, or just one that sits on the kitchen surface for maybe €500?

€2,000 for a bleedin' coffee machine seems a bit toppish to me, and by not having it built-in we have space for a bigger American stylie fridge freezer. I like the idea of instant coffee, but do these new things make a proper "mug" of coffee or only those poxy little over-strong squirts - so you have to hit the button twice?

Hey, JE, we bought our house with the kitchen put in by the previous owners (one of the big selling points on the house). We have a big-ass American fridge with the ice/crushed ice/water dispenser in the door and one of those 500€ coffee machines on the counter. Personally, I would not build one in but then, I'm not a coffee drinker(nor cappucino, espresso or any of that crap). So, it's always a waste of money to me.

Go for the fridge - you have more use for it.

500 EUR is still way to much for a coffee machine.. 100-200 MAX

Sir English of Augsburg,

If you get a top of the line espresso maker I will call into your gaff every morning on my way to work for a refreshing cuppa.

Moral of the story, get the cheaper one.

@JE:Where the hell is your house? Mine is located in Holzkirchen, although already built. It has an extension built 1985. I shall be beginning on the garden Arbeit when we get in. Hope we can compare notes there.

3-Liter-Haus Plan 492.2

wot on earth does that mean!

the house only capacitates 3 litres???

you guys can tell i have loads of time on my hands here at work...

off for lunch people

Out where I live most of the population still live in caves, which keeps the land prices down. There is some simple farming out here, but most of us just live on berries or go mammoth hunting when we need protein.

Smallish village called Klosterlechfeld about 40 minutes West of central Munich, about 10 mins north of Landsberg and 20 minutes south of Augsburg, if that makes sense?

If you're building a free standing house in a suburb of Munich and you're still considering buying a coffee machine for 2000,- smackers (which btw I have never heard of before ... built-in? Into what?) you must be seriously loaded. My advice: get both, try which one you like, and sell the other one on Toytown so we can all parttake a little, or at least the lucky buyer ... ;-)

http://www.pdf.info-place.de/surpresso-einbau-i2.pdf

Ooh, that's nice. Good thing my boyfriend hasn't seen that!! He'd want one and our Saeco would be on EBay already!

I hear ya Expet, I hear ya. Kinda why I posted the question. There is no freakin' way under normal circumstances I would spend €2,000 on an over-hyped kettle.

However, and this seems to be the issue, when building a new house from scratch you seem to get gripped by some kinda "gotta-get-it-perfect" madness. Generally I am NOT a perfectionist, I see life as just one long compromise of joined-together fuck ups. A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow is my motto.

But a new house build is a blank canvas, unlike buying any kinda ready-built or previously owned house. So if there is a cock-up like a room that is too small, or badly lit rooms or something - it is basically your responsibility, and you have to live with it.

Furthemore normally when buying a house I think "yeah, that will do for a few years" but when building from scratch there is the chance that this will be the last house you ever live in (scary!), so it is difficult to accept much compromise. Also 'cos the numbers are quite big, and keep changing, from say 300,000 to 340,000 to 380,000 etc (usually up!!) it is easy to miss the odd extra €2,000 in the great equation!!!

And of course you end up with a degree of stuipid pride in the project, you know family and friends will visit and judge, and if you have built an ugly ill-fitting box it is gonna piss you off. And ironically I am very laid back about the project, so it must be quite a game if you are a more stressy kinda worrier.

Even if you don't build your own house!! When we moved into our new house, which, of course, we thought was beautiful - although not perfect (no garage...yet), we had the usual naysayers - 'oh, it's too far out of town', 'are you sure it's only 4 years old?', 'there's too many windows and people can see in - I would hate that' etc, etc...it really put a damper on what was already a stressful but exciting day for us.

I'm sure if we had built our own house (as we originally planned), we would have ended up divorced!

Johnny, we're in a similar situation right now, although we bought an old house that is now being refurbished and slightly re-built ... of course we'd like to go with the best of everything, but then, as you say, the numbers tend to spiral out of proportion/control quite quickly.

Already now I can see that our combined house purchase & refurbishment is considerably beyond what we were anticipating. Well, of course you could say "bad planning", and I'd probably have to agree to some extent, but from what I hear, this happens to almost everyone. And because that's the general tendency, there's even less holding back, you know what I'm sayin'? I have no idea how much dosh you have, but take it easy, you've only just dug a hole, still need to "fill it up" with a house and everything in it ... !

It's probably a plan by the wife. She will try and make me sell my motorbike to buy one of these for over €1,000:



What is it? You mean you haven't already got one? Well it's the really essential Siemens Dressman shirt-ironing gizmo. Fortunately I rarely wear shirts and have a well-trained mother-in-law.

Anyway, back to the plot... (geddit!)

This morning I spotted some men playing with quicksand:

And finally - kinda looks too small to me in this shot???

Cool pics...I wanna play...and you are right, that last shot looks a bit small for the house that you described. I'm sure it's just an optical illusion though.

Interesting footprint, are you going to have a basement under your garage? At least it looks as if they didn't abandon you after diggin the hole! Exciting times! Just because you're into placing their products here: do you work for Siemens?

How much does one of those Siemens Dressman thingies go for? That would be great for my boyfriend.

It is weird - but it is not a "monster" sized house. The area the guys are standing in is 10 x 12 metres I think. So ends up as about 150 sq meter of cellar (also goes half under the garage, you cannot see well in that shot), 120 sq meter ground floor (plus 65sq meter garage) and I guess 80sq meter of 1st floor. Anything on the 1st floor below 2 meter height does not count as "living space". So it all starts to add up, but I don't know the exact figures.

In the 2nd shot you can see the basement at the rear extending across 50% of the garage - the garage itself goes across to the boundary. So this will be our "traditional" cellar room for junk - snowboards, beer, old toys etc. The rest of the cellar will be used for my "boys room", guest bed + bath, heating and washroom.

Wow! Looks and sounds great...

Really big lot!

Keep us posted...congrats by the way

What are the options in germany for financing such a project?

Sorry HartlepoolLad, I cannot help on that question. YorkshireLad6 is our resident expert on these things.

Mr English, how many, ah, past business associates have been consigned to the foundations ?

Don't worry about the size JE, the building will always look too small until you start painting and furnishing the rooms. at least that was my experience.

Hey JE

congratulations - you've got further in two weeks than we have in 3 months. Why oh why didn't we go for a new build. Hmmm.

We are still waiting for planning permission/listed building consent.

Our place still looks like this:




And if you really, really want a built-in coffee machine then check out ebay:
http://search-desc.ebay.de/search/search.d...=&fsop=1&fsoo=1

...still not cheap though.

Are you up for a Landsberg curry again sometime?

Shallot

Walls are all up in the cellar now - they stick up a framework and the pour the concrete gloop down the gaps, they will be finished on that today. Got a nice big crane on site as well.

Just selected an electrician who happens to be related to the extended family, so not expecting too much trouble from that firm.

Getting lots of constant niggly questions. What height doors do we want? Do we really want a system that cools the air from outside as it can cause a high bacteria count?

Architect says we need a thicker wall to add some of the lights we want. The bloke supplying the lights says that is a load of bollox etc.

Bit of a discussion about the area around the stairs. We are having it open so you can see down into the basement, but this narrows the area in the hall slightly etc blah blah.

Basically it's a kinda gentle drip of questions, half of which we think are daft or think we already clearly answered in the past.

We seem to keep changing the doors and windows in the study. I am an akward bastard and cannot bear to have windows or doors behind me when working at a desk, which means the desk cannot be set against a wall etc. This is also important Feng Shui - you will be nervous and unlucky if people can sneak up on you.

I am told they never order the windows until the spaces are built, 'cos there is too much margin for error in trying to do this from the plans, so should not be a major drama.

Shallot - not much you can do I guess without planning permission although I have found the Germans pretty reasonable so far in this respect and much quicker than in the UK. Curry is a good call, I guess we need to post up a who wants to come thread.

Couple more progress pictures from the weekend (all looks a bit "recycled" to me):

Well they are chucking the roof on the cellar today.

Last night was a sudden flap with the electrician. Suddenly needed to know loads more details on the wiring, before they lay tonnes of permanent concrete this morning.

Considering I gave all the details to the architect weeks and weeks ago, and they did the plans, last night ended up as a quick dash in the car round to the electricians house. 1 hour 15 mins later we were sorted.

I have no problems with any of it, but the wife is a crabby stress monster now - she cannot hack it and is making my life a bit of a misery frankly. She has the usual kids/household issues and also some business issues but the new build just adds to things - and she deals with the architect.

We also heard on the grapevine that the architect thinks we are rather "difficult" clients, but I think the source was more of a deliberate feed frankly. Just what I need - political games as well.

Difficult or not.. You paid him (or will), so tell'em to F-off and deal with it!!

Well, it's OK to be difficult - who cares what the architect things - he is paid to deal with 'difficult' clients. Why shouldn't you be difficult - this is your house - the house you will, presumably, live in for the rest of your life. Hopefully, your architect won't make the stupid mistakes the architect of our house did (one that is costing him 10K€ to fix).

er what does difficult mean? people want houses they feel comfortable with,if he cant deal with that thats his problem, it goes with the job of any designer to understand the wishes of a client, and if you want your begroom in the cellar, he should advise you against it but not get into a tiss.

kitkat64, do tell!

i meant bedroom. a begroom is usualy in the cellar. complete with whips, chains and leather apperel

Yeah as you can guess there are two sides to the story! We have to "nag" to get amendments to plans done. Or when you give the amendments, the plans come back and they haven't been done. Or you answer all the questions/queries and then about 3 weeks later you get the same questions back again.

And you get the daft stuff like being about to start the build, and then being told that we need to dig up 3 metres of the neighbours garden if we really want the cellar that size. At which point we agree to make the cellar smaller - but we are not pyschic and not builders!

Oh, well, the architect is the brother of the former owner. They built the house almost 5 years ago. She (the owner) designed every little detail of the house with her brother so the house is incredible - however, she did not want the protective cover that goes around the outside of the house (where the basement meets the walls of the house) to show. So, they put stones around the basement and only a little of the plastic protector shows above it. Then they decided to do this swirling type of design to the plaster/clay stuff that covers the stone walls. Well, the builder advised both the architect and the owner not to do the swirling thing and to make the protective plastic border higher - the builder also sent a letter to the architect telling him he would not take responsibility for the possible consequences (moisture getting into the walls) - but, the architect did it anyway. Well, after we moved into the house in January - it snowed and snowed and snowed and, of course, water got into the walls right where the builder said it would and now we have cracked plaster/clay and chipping paint on the outside and all the paint on the inside walls upstairs is bubbled and peeling. And, this is only one side of the house (thankfully). So, the architect is paying to repair it all plus repair the lack of protective plastic around the bottom of the house.

Phew!

All this shinnanigins and no alchohol. You are some kinda fella! Hats off!

@Rizzo - you don't know what me and Gideon are up to at the moment! I need my head seeing to.

architects can indeed be rather picky when you go changing 'their' house. by profession i'm a landscape architect and you can consider every project your own. customers were just there to pay for the cost of creating my garden! a bit extreme but they're creative and sensitive types at heart and you're buggering them about!

still, the damn prick should get on and deal with it. blummin' flip!