Haven’t written here about it, but last March we finally started on
our journey to get our own house build, so we can move out of the
rented flat here.

That will be a big step, both the actual building, but also the
moving – I am living at this one single place for 36 years now.

If you can read german there is a dedicated
webpage where I sometimes write about the
process. Will have much more details (and way more ramblings) than the
following part.

If you can’t read german, a somewhat short summary follows. Yes,
still a lot of text, but shortened, still.

What? Why now?

Current flat has 83m² – which simply isn’t enough space. And
the number of rooms also doesn’t fit anymore. But it is hard to find a
place that fits our requirements (which do include location).

Moving to a different rented place would also mean changed amount of
rent. And nowadays that would be huge increase (my current rent is
still the price from about 30 years ago!).

So if we go and pay more – we could adjust and pay for something we
own instead. And both, my wife and I had changes in our jobs that made
it possible for us now, so we started looking.

Market

Brrrr, looking is good, actually finding something that fits – not so.
We never found an offer that fit. Space wise, sure. But then location
was off, or price was idiotically high. Location fit, but then size
was a joke, and guess about the price… Who needs 200 square meters
with 3 rooms? Entirely stupid design choices there. Or how about 40
square meters of hallway – with 50m² of tiny rooms around. What are
they smoking? Oh, there, useful size, good rooms – but now you want
more money than a kidney is worth, or something. Thanks, no.

New place

In February 2025 we finally got lucky and found a (newly opened) area
with a large number of places to build a house on. Had multiple talks
with someone from on of the companies developing that area (there are
two you can select from), then talked with banks and signed a contract
in March 2025. We got promised that actual house construction would be
first quarter of 2026, finished in second quarter.

House type

There are basically 2 ways of building a new house (that matter here).
First is called “Massivhaus”, second is called “Fertighaus” in german,
roughly translating to solid and prefabricated. The latter commonly a
wood based construction, though it doesn’t need to be. The important
part of it is the prefabrication, walls and stuff get assembled in a
factory somewhere and then transported to your place, where they play
“big kid lego” for a day and suddenly a house is there.

A common thought is “prefabricated” is faster, but that is only a half
true. Sure, the actual work on side is way shorter – usually one or
two days and the house is done – while a massive construction usually
takes weeks to build up. But that is only a tiny part of the time
needed, the major part goes of into planning and waiting and in there
it doesn’t matter what material you end up with.

Money fun

Last year already wasn’t the best time to start a huge loan – but
isn’t it always “a few years ago would have been better”? So we had
multiple talks with different banks and specialised consultants until
we found something that we thought is good for us.

Thinking about it now – we should have put even more money on top as
“reserve”, but who could have thought that 2026 turns into such a
shitshow? Does not help at all, quite the contrary. And that damn
lotto game always ends up with the wrong numbers, meh.

Plans and plans and more plans – and rules

For whichever reason you can not just go and put something on your
ground and be happy. At least not if you are part of the normal people and not
enormously rich. There is a large set of rules to follow. Usually that
is a good thing, even though some rules are sometimes hard to understand.

In Germany, besides the usual laws, we have something that is called
“Bebauungsplan”, which translates to “development plan” (don’t know if
that carries the right meaning, it’s a plan on what and how may be
build, which can have really detailed specifications in). It basically
tells you every aspect on top of the normal law that you have to
keep in mind.

In our case we have the requirement of 2 full floors and CAN have a
third smaller on top, it limits how high the house can be and also
how high our ground floor may be compared to the street. It regulates
where on the property we may build and how much ground we may cover
with the house, it gives a set of colors we are allowed to use, it
demands a flat roof that we must have as a green roof and has a number
of things more that aren’t important enough to list here. If you do
want to see the full list, my german post on it has all the details
that matter to
us.

With all that stuff in mind – off to plans. Wouldn’t have believed how
many details there are to take in. Room sizes are simple, but how to
arrange them for ideal usage of the sun, useful ways inside the house,
but also keeping in mind that water needs to flow through and out.
Putting a bath room right atop a living room means a water pipe needs
to go down there. Switch the bath room side in the house, and it
suddenly is above the kitchen – means you can connect the pipes from
it to the ones from kitchen, which is much preferred than going
through the living room. And lots more such things.

It took us until nearly end of October to finalize the plans! And we
learned a whole load from it. We started with a lot of wishes. The
planner tried to make them work. Then we changed our minds. Plans
changed. Minds changed again. Comparing the end result with the first
draft we changed most of the ground floor around, with only the stairs
and the entrance door at the same position. Less changes for the upper
floor, but still enough.

Side quests

The whole year was riddled with something my son named side quests. We
visited a construction exhibition near us, we went to the house
builders factory and took a look on how they work. We went to many
different other companies that do SOME type of work which we need
soon, say inside floors, painters, kitchen and more stuff.

Of course the most important side quest was a visit to the notary to
finalize the contracts, especially for the plot of land (in Germany
you must have a notary for that to get entered into the governments
books). Creates lots of fees, of course, for the notary and also the
government (both fees and taxes here).

Building permit

We had been lucky and only needed a small change to the plans to get
the building permit – and the second part, the wastewater permit (yes,
you need a separate one for this) also got through without trouble.

Choices, so many of them

So in January we finally had an appointment for something that’s
called “Bemusterung” which badly translates to “Sampling”. Basically
two days at the house builders factory to select all of what’s needed
for the house that you don’t do in the plans. Doors, inside and out
and their type and color and handles. Same things for the windows and
the blinds and the protection level you want the windows to have.
Decide about stairs, design for the sanitary installations – and also
the height of the toilet! – and the tiles to put into the bathrooms.
Decisions on all the tech needed (heating system, ventilation and
whatnot.

Two days, busy ones – and you can easily spend a lot of extra money
here if you aren’t careful. We managed to get “out of it” with only
about 4000€ extra, so pretty good.

Electro and automation

Now, here I am special. Back when I was young the job I learned is
electrician. So here I have very detailed wishes. I am also running
lots of automatism in my current flat – obviously the new house should
be better than that. So I have a lot of ideas and thoughts on it, so
this is entirely extra and certainly out of the ordinary the house
builder usually see.

Which means I do all of that on my own. Well, the planning and some of
the work, I must have a company at hand for certain tasks, it is
required by some rules. But they will do what I planned, as long as I
don’t violate regulations.

Which means the whole electrical installation is … different.
Entirely planned for automatisms and using KNX for it. I am so happy
to ditch Homeassistant and the load of Homematic, Zigbee and ZWave
based wireless things.

Ok, Homeassistant is a nice thing – it can do a lot. And it can bridge
between about any system you can find. But it is a central single point of
failure. And it is a system that needs constant maintenance. Not
touched for a while? Plan for a few hours playing update whack-a-mole.
And often enough a component here or there breaks with an update. Can
be fixed, but takes another hour or two.

So I change. Away from wireless based stuff. To wires. To a system
thats a standard for decades already. And works entirely without a
SPOF. (Yes, you can add one here too). And, most important, should I
ever die – can easily be maintained by anyone out there dealing with
KNX, which is a large number of people and companies. Without digging
through dozens of specialised integrations and whatnot.

I may even end up with Homeassistant again – but that will entirely be
as a client. It won’t drive automations. It won’t be the central point
to do anything for the house. It will be a logging and data collecting
thing that enables me to put up easy visualizations. It may be an easy
interface for smartphones or tablets to control parts of the house,
for those parts where one wants this to happen. Not the usual
day-to-day stuff, extras on top.

Actual work happening

Since march there finally is action visible. The base of the house
is getting build. Wednesday the 1st April we finally got the base
slab poured on the construction site and in another 10 days the house
is getting delivered and build up. A 40ton mobile crane will be there.