Buying a house - taking a detour to your dream home

To be honest, I never really considered buying a house. Quite the opposite. I was actually absolutely sure that I would always rent. But as you may have noticed, things turned out very differently for us. And that's exactly what we're going to talk about here. The question of why we're buying a house.

At the beginning there is a problem

Right at the beginning of our journey were the little problems that you have as a renter. In our case, it was our kitchen. Sure, many people envy our large, open kitchen, but for me it is a real thorn in my side. Anyone who knows me knows that I love to cook. And anyone who loves to cook will know how important a well-organized kitchen is. And that's where the problem starts. Our kitchen is beautiful, but pretty impractical.

Maybe it's the missing drawers, or the somewhat nonsensical layout of the worktop, or the lack of sockets on the right-hand side of the kitchen. Maybe it's the old ceramic hob, or the outdated oven. Whatever it is in the end, I've never really warmed to our kitchen.

What doesn't fit will be made to fit

As you probably know, we are happy to go to great expense and effort to make our home the way we want it. That's why we decided to do a kitchen renovation at the beginning of this year. However, it is an integral part of the apartment. We rented it. Simply tearing it out and redoing it was not an option. So what should we do? We spent weeks considering different options and were ultimately faced with a rather sobering result.

We didn't really like any of the ideas we had. Actually, the only solution was to tear it down and do it again. And there it was. The one sentence that everyone who lives in rented accommodation has probably said: "It's not worth it in a rented apartment."

The idea is born

And suddenly this thought occurred to me: Why not buy a house ourselves? Or better yet, why not build a house? At first we were joking. But the topic came up again and again. It just wouldn't let us go. But why not? In our circle of friends and acquaintances there are people who buy a house or an apartment, even people who build one. So why was that never an option for us?

"We'll never be able to afford that!" That was pretty much the first thought that came to both of us. But why not? Sure, we don't earn huge amounts of money, but we both have jobs and they don't pay that badly. At least the people around us who buy a house or an apartment don't earn much more than we do.

Buy or build?

We both love architecture and I'm sure that everyone who is interested in interior design also has a heart for good architecture. Unfortunately, most of what you see is one thing above all else: ugly. So buying didn't seem to be a real option. We simply couldn't imagine that there was a house out there for sale that we liked. And certainly not one that we liked as it is. So it was immediately clear to us: we want to build! Where? We didn't know yet, but we were quite sure that it should be built.

Who should pay for this?

As always in life, a crucial question quickly arose: How do we pay for it all? Or, to be more specific, how much money would a bank lend us? We had already done some research on various internet platforms, but the results didn't seem entirely reliable. But we wanted to know exactly. What is our budget?

So we asked. Directly. We went to an appointment with the bank, presented our documents and asked: What can we afford? And less than half an hour later we were there - with a number.

Unfortunately, the number was a bit of both: too high to abandon the idea of ​​owning your own home and too low to simply buy your dream home. So it was going to be difficult. But let's be honest: we hadn't expected anything else.

Goodbye Hamburg

One thing was immediately clear: if we wanted to buy anything bigger than a garage, we would have to leave Hamburg city center. You can read what prompted us to say goodbye to the hustle and bustle of the city here . But if not Hamburg, then where?

One thing was immediately clear to us. Our professional focus should remain in Hamburg. We both love our jobs and definitely want to keep them. However, we both work from home quite a lot. So leaving the city was an option. The only question that remained was: where to?

To be honest: Do you know all the outskirts and suburbs of your city? No? Neither do we. And so we spent the following weekends driving around the area and seeing what there was.

Gut feeling decides

So we drove. Whether east or west, south or north. We looked at pretty much everything. Always with the question in the back of our minds: Can I imagine living here? And unfortunately we often knew the answer straight away, even before we got out of the car: No! We can't.

The idea of ​​leaving the city and moving to a quiet suburb sounds somewhat romantic, but most quiet suburbs are anything but that. Somehow we never really got the feeling that this is where we belong.

After we had slowly explored all of Hamburg's outskirts, desperation drove us further out into the countryside. Everything within an hour's drive of Hamburg became our search area. But here too, the clear 'no's' were the order of the day.

Oh how beautiful is Lüneburg

At some point Lüneburg was on the list. We know a few people who live there and work in Hamburg, and we always hear how beautiful it is. But I had never been to Lüneburg before. So we got in the car and drove through the Elbe tunnel. A short walk through Lüneburg's old town was on the agenda.

Do you know that feeling when you arrive somewhere and immediately fall in love with it? That's exactly how I felt on my first visit. Lüneburg is a charming little town with a perfectly preserved medieval town center. Everything is close together and yet everything you need is there. Everything is just as if it was made for us!

property search

So it had to be Lüneburg. We were sure of that. Now we just had to find a suitable plot of land for our future dream house. But what we didn't know was that this was where the problems really started. Good building plots are difficult or even impossible to find. And if you do find something, it's either in a poor location or the plot is oddly shaped or the building regulations only allow for a tiny house.

But things were about to get worse. When you find something suitable and contact the relevant estate agent, the answer is usually: Nothing! And so we spent the next few weeks driving around and looking at properties that in the end no one wanted to sell to us.

But buy a house?

In addition to the search for land, I had also placed an order for houses. Maybe there was something that could simply be demolished. And one day a small town house appeared in the middle of Lüneburg. The whole thing was a bit too expensive to simply demolish, but the location was a dream. Why not just take a look at the whole thing.

To our surprise, we received an invitation to view the property immediately. We had previously spent days phoning the estate agents to no avail, only to be told that the property had unfortunately been sold. Here, we not only received an immediate response, but also a viewing appointment at the same time.

However, we actually wanted to build and not buy anything. So we weren't really interested in the property. But since no one else had invited us to a viewing, we thought: what the heck? Just go along to an appointment. Then at least it won't be the first time with the next property.

Love at first sight

And there we were. In front of a house that we didn't really want to see. Well, the area was actually quite nice and it was much more centrally located than anything we had seen up to that point, but it wasn't an empty lot. No, it was more or less the opposite. A semi-detached house of a townhouse built in 1920. Demolition was not an option here. The only thing that could be done with it was renovation. That was immediately clear.

Less than an hour later we were back in the car on the way home. The house was not at all what we had imagined and yet it radiated a warmth and coziness that immediately captivated both of us. In the end, we had perhaps not found what we were looking for, but perhaps what we really wanted? Was it perhaps exactly that: our dream house?