Moving to a new Home – Part II

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I wish someone would have told me this before starting to look for a house to live in. It’s pretty obvious: Imagine how you would live there. Imagine your day to day. Your commute to work, groceries, fun..

And not just imagine. Build a mockup of the house from the blueprints (there are lots of free software apps for this and place all the stuff you have and want in their place. Try to see if it all fits and makes sense. You can then think of doing some renovations if needed, which furniture to buy and so on.

Whilst searching, we had a look at a lot of houses for sale. It made a huge difference if the house was inhabited right now or if it was empty. It’s very difficult to imagine you living in an empty house, the size of the furniture is hard to grasp.

Helping your imagination

If you are somewhat like me, there’s a limit to how much your imagination can help you. That’s why smart engineers have developed 3D design software 🙂

I used “Sweet Home 3D” which is free and has all the features I wanted. I asked for the blueprints of the house. Sadly, and shockingly, the blueprints were lost in a fire years ago, and all they had was a picture of the blueprints that helped me nearly nothing. So I borrowed a laser measurement tool and measured each room, from wall to wall to ceiling, with all the angles and doors and windows and whatnot, and created my own blueprint. It sounds like a lot of work, but it isn’t a large apartment, and thinking of each room as independent of the other rooms helps a lot.

With the measures at hand, I opened the software and began drawing the walls. In nearly no time, I had a pretty good blueprint of the apartment.

A view of the drawings of the house I created

Now my imagination had backup and was able to start working.

I took measurements of the essentials: bed, tables, chairs and such, and put them in the house to see how they would look. I could “walk” in the apartment and have a feeling of how the space will feel like. I could move walls, furniture, paint the walls and have an immediate feeling of how it would look like.

A 3D view of the living room

I strongly recommend you invest some hours to do this.

The Renovation

I had some must-have things in mind when we started the renovation. I needed water and gas on the balcony. Water for the plants and gas for the grill.

We also needed to take down a small wall to make room for the closet.

Apart from that, we just went with the flow. Really bad idea…

There are some outlets that are missing (and now are my personal project) and we asked to remake the windows at the end of the renovation, so that took extra time and they had to repaint the wall, which cost extra, in vain.

We had no clue what lighting fixture we wanted, so we just avoided them and I installed them afterwards.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from this, it is to really imagine yourself living there. Where are your stuff, where do the plugs need to be? Where will you sit and what do you need beside you?

But, at the end, don’t think you’ll manage to get it perfect and leave some budget for all the stuff you’ll remember after the renovation.

Talking about budget, we had a kind-of-a budget, we didn’t follow it thoroughly but we didn’t go past it by a lot. I don’t believe you can get a perfect budget and follow it thoroughly and I do believe there are a lot of unknowns and badgers get overflown. 

The only error we made that was a real bummer were the windows. If we had thought about replacing them at the beginning there wouldn’t have been an extra cost for the extra painting. 

Remember – there are things that if you don’t do at the first renovation, you’ll probably never do them.

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