We bought a house in England!

Yes, you read it right! We moved to England, gave up everything in Germany, registered in England, I also registered my business here in England and we brought most of our furniture to the UK – and now we bought a house! 

We do not do things half assed 😛 

Honestly, we’ve wanted to buy something for at least seven years. It never worked out in Berlin, the bank wouldn’t give us a loan and then the city became dramatically more expensive every year. At the moment, we couldn’t have afforded to find property in Berlin that we could pay for.

In England, we now live in a relatively small town where property prices are ok. In addition, as First Buyers we were able to save a few costs. In addition, renting in England is very expensive and not as pleasant as in Germany. Here, the topic of buying a house is very different than in Germany. It’s still a huge thing, but it’s definitely worth it because of the not so nice rental situation compared to Germany. But I don’t want to bore you with all the technical details. Here is some concrete information about our house:

It’s a typical Terraced House. The total area is a bit smaller than our apartment in Berlin, but we finally have a garden! Half of it is a Fixer Upper, which means we have some conversion plans! The kitchen is to be completely rebuilt, and walls are to be torn up. We want to install new balcony doors and renew the roof window. This one is unfortunately not completely watertight and on another wall it gets very damp in heavy rain, so we have to redo the whole construction on the kitchen anyway.

Therefore we will install a completely new kitchen. Well, not really “new”. We have found a second-hand kitchen online, bought it and it’s now in storage. When the extension and the skylight are finished, we will paint the second-hand kitchen, rework it a bit and then install it again. The current kitchen is unfortunately not of very high quality, falls half apart and is not made of real wood, so we can’t really refurbish it.

A completely new kitchen was out of the question for us at the moment, because: We want to avoid the typical Swedish furniture store kitchens as much as possible. But we can’t afford sustainable alternatives right now. Unfortunately they are not in our budget, at least not at the moment. In a YouTube video I saw a girl who found a second-hand kitchen made of real wood and installed it. That is also our plan. Online we also found a suitable model for 400 pounds pretty quickly and we took it immediately. Keep your fingers crossed that everything will work out fine with the installation 🙂 We are quite handy, but still 🙂 But until then it will take a few months until the construction work is finished. Because of Covid, many construction companies have hardly any capacity, because everything was pushed back.

Our original plan was also to get the keys in June and then have 2-3 months transition period. Now, due to Covid, we unfortunately received the keys only two days before we moved out of the rented apartment (where we had to leave). It was super stressful to manage the whole move in these 2-3 days. There are only two of us, we don’t know many people here and our parents can’t come either. But everything worked out fine and a few months delay is no drama. Unfortunately, we only have to look for a place to stay for 3-5 weeks when the construction work is in full swing, because there are also some things to do in the bathroom. During this time the house is not habitable.

So it remains exciting, there is a lot to do, also many small projects, DIYs, painting and repairs. I will definitely keep you up to date here and on YouTube. On Instagram Stories as well, of course! Below this text you can find some first impressions from the empty house. I bet you won’t really notice the details that still have to be done, like the floor, the inner cabinets of the built-in closets, actually everything in the bathroom and everything in the kitchen, painting everywhere and other small things. It’s hard to convey it on photos. It is a great project, with a lot of potential.

Oh yes, and Fun Fact, almost every room has a fireplace:

And then we discovered an amazing surprise: out of curiosity, we pulled up the entrance mat on the first day and discovered the original tiles underneath! The glue is still stuck to it so the mat had been lying on the tiles for years! What a waste, but of course good for us, because they are quite well preserved. We just have to refurbish them a little bit: