Bungalow - 2 floors with large layout / 3 floors with small layout?

What I also think plays a role is whether you can still finance the €275,000 if the construction cost estimate was roughly correct, but I personally don't know enough about that. Is your bungalow already paid off? Do your parents then pay you rent or pay off the house themselves? What happens if they are possibly no longer around; is it still affordable? There are many points, but they should all be considered... Best regards

The parents are selling their house and are putting the proceeds into the new building, so we will probably only need a 100,000 loan from the bank. Our income situation is good due to dual employment as a senior executive in finance as well as freelance work – therefore financial planning and financial risk capacity are assured.

Ok good, then from a financial technical perspective there is not much in the way, I’d say roughly 175k equity is of course a nice thing, with that a 100k loan easily with a very good interest rate is possible.

That is the reason why we actually want to do it now as well. On the one hand, we assume to get a fairly good selling price for the old house at the current interest rate level, and on the other hand, thanks to the large equity check from the parents, we can manage a real financing that, in the best case, will come at 1.2% for 10 years. We will have to see how things continue in the summer, but due to the aggressive ECB policy and the uncertainty of the markets, which currently push interest rates even further down, we assume that the timing is very good for refinancing.

I am slowly starting to believe that the low interest rates are the "new normal," but you never know if it might change again in three years...

Yeah, I think doing it now is not wrong. I personally am also of the opinion that the interest rates will hardly change or will go down in the next 4/5 years. But you never know, so this is also my personal advice always

- Build new immediately (new financing)
- New contract for old financing either directly with the maximum term, or 5 years to fix it again until the end, because as I said, I don't expect interest rates to rise significantly, but maybe they will go down again, but that's speculation and always to be clarified individually.

Best regards

Neglecting the walls is quite daring, I think. So our house has a footprint (including walls) of about 90m² and with an open design we still have "only" 70m² of actual living space on the ground floor. The rest is taken up by stairs and walls (external 36.5 cm, internal 17.5 cm). Just to give you an idea, you can comfortably subtract 20%...