My standard of living during the first 2 years of my stay in Germany can best be described as ‘student life’. Within the limited means of an educational loan and a part-time job, one private room along with shared kitchen and bathroom is all I could afford. And frankly, all I really needed. Thus my first 3 homes here – the university hostel during my masters course, another hostel during my thesis and a shared apartment when I just started working, served their purpose excellently. Also, not being very choosy, finding these places had not been particularly difficult. But things changed when my wedding got fixed, my fiancé and I had to look for a more ‘respectable’ place for later.
Having just transitioned from students to professionals, our spending habits were still a lot student-like. This also reflected in our apartment search criteria. In addition to the rent having to be ‘very reasonable’, the place had to be brokerage-free, which is otherwise a rip-off here. But since most house owners preferred to rent out through brokers, we had very few options to choose from. And with my fiancé’s paying guest contract expiring at the end of the month, we were quite desperate for something to work out for her till then.
Our prayers were soon answered, however in quite an ugly form. A rundown building under renovation, looking horrible from the outside and hollowed out from the inside. As we walked through the construction site, the over-enthusiastic owner painted verbal pictures of the apartment, once the renovation work ended in a couple of months. If things worked out as per his plans, it would indeed be the perfect house the two of us could make our first home together in. The apartment was sufficiently big, the available area was well laid out in the rooms, the view from the balcony of the vineyards was lovely and the place was located right on the bus route to our office. We were made for each other! So with assurances of a ‘livable’ apartment until the moving-in date and the subsequent completion of the rest at the earliest, we decided to take it.
In the couple of weeks till the due date, the apartment actually saw an impressive transformation, even exceeding our expectations. But for the still to-be painted doors, to-be fixed window shutters and to-be serviced heaters, the change from our first visit was as drastic as the transition between seasons in Germany. We were optimistic that if the work progressed at this pace, our dream home might be ready earlier than planned. With these high hopes, my dear fiancé made no fuss about moving into an unfinished apartment, making do with the frugal furnishing of only a standing lamp for lighting, only a mattress for a bed and only a hot-plate for a kitchen with a fully functional bathroom. After the wedding, we took our own sweet time converting the interconnected rooms into our home, supervising the kitchen being assembled, planning the furnishing for the rooms, shopping for the suitable pieces of furniture and putting their building blocks together.
All this excitement distracted us from noticing that the construction work was gradually slowing down, until it eventually came to a halt. After finishing our apartment, the owner went on to complete the bare essentials in the other apartments in the building, just enough to be able to rent them out. But several tasks in the common areas remained unfinished. Work begun on a promised storage room in the basement was abandoned, leaving the laundry room and staircase always covered with dust, the corridor walls were an optic disaster with protruding piping and wiring, the backyard was strewn with construction rubble. We laughed away other dreams that the owner had sold to us, like painting the building exteriors and laying out parking spaces in the backyard, rather would be grateful if he fixed the ‘unbearables’! After about a year of innumerable phone calls, empty promises, unmet deadlines, meetings with other tenants, rent reduction measures and exchange of written threats about legal implications, we had exhausted our last ounce of patience. It was clear that the owner had long since left us to our fate and we could only lose our peace of mind further over the matter while gaining nothing. We were in the mood to show him two of our fingers and move out!
But the decision to shift could not be a knee-jerk reaction, rather required careful consideration. Shifting would mean a whole lot of effort all over again and we had just about finished setting up this place. There was a compulsory 3-month notice period before we could move out and other rental apartments were available only about a month in advance. This meant that we could either play safe, find a new apartment and then let go of this one, in which case we would have to pay double rent during the overlapping months. Or we had to quit here and hope that we would find something suitable in those 3 months, which ran the risk of having to settle for something worse than this place! Also, we were to shortly visit India for a month, which would take away valuable searching time. But if we waited until after our return to quit, we would have to shift during the painful winter months. So the choice was pretty straight forward - either quit right now or suffer this apartment and its owner till spring next year. After several discussions between the two of us, against sane advice from our colleagues against such a misadventure, with mixed feelings of relief and anxiety, we posted our decision to the owner!
As expected, nothing worked out during the 2 weeks before our India visit, leaving us with only a month and a half on our return to find our new home. Once back, the search party got to work with full force, this time with a more open mind (or rather pocket!) towards apartments with less reasonable rent and with brokerage. Out of the 40 odd prospective apartments, we short-listed 25, got appointments to check out 15, among which only about 5 came close to taking away the honours. But every one of them had at least 1 show-stopper. Either the place was located next to a graveyard or the kitchen was too small or the apartment was left in a bad shape by the previous tenants. With little over a month left, our restlessness grew amidst witty offers from our colleagues of their basements and carton boxes, “if it comes to it”! But just when the countdown clock showed exactly 1 month to go, we found a place where we could imagine ourselves living in.
The apartment along with 2 others, is part of a newly renovated building, which means newly insulated walls, new heating system, new bath fittings, new modular kitchen, newly painted interiors and exteriors – all new, for an acceptable rent and brokerage. A quiet residential locality and a lovely park just in front of the house are the icing on the cake. As the owners and we found each other suitable, it was a done deal and the broker did the needful in putting a contract in place.
As we spend our last days in the present apartment, planning the shifting and the arranging of our new home, I wonder if it was the right decision to take the leap of faith. It could have ended differently, one is wiser only in the end. But who cares when it ends well?! Cheers to happy endings, hip-hip…
