Buy a church and convert it into a residence?

Hello,

in our region, a church is being offered for sale. Is it possible to convert something like this into a house with reasonable financial effort? What kind of material is on the roof? What should one pay attention to during a viewing?

If you have set up a decent screen, you at least have a cinema, seating is sufficiently available...

I would have the whole thing looked at by an expert who evaluates the substance

I have already seen a few converted churches where drywall construction was used, walls were inserted and galleries were created.

This sometimes leads to oddly shaped walls because windows, gables, etc. have to be taken into account.

Those were old churches in the UK, it should be similar here.

Have the expert also check this with regard to flood protection and damage

The question of financing. It is more of a collector's item. Not everyone finances it.

So, 160k in the Rhein Main area Odenwald Heidelberg for 138 sqm with a basement is initially very tempting. However, one must not forget that the house had a completely different use. Because of music and singing, it was supposed to have some reverberation, it was supposed to convey height, it was supposed to depict heaven. Heating and separability were subordinate concerns. And so on. Additionally, why is it being sold? Probably because there is no longer a community using it. That was already the case yesterday. What is not used easily falls into disrepair. It is perceived as a burden... enough reasons to approach the property with a professional, architect, civil engineer K.

Church buildings nowadays are most often "freed" through parish mergers, i.e. at least not primarily abandoned because of the uneconomical nature of maintaining them themselves. In the latter case, demolitions and new constructions would also be more frequent, so I would initially suspect less that the substance is to be considered very bad. And for the buyers, such cases are no longer a great rarity, and therefore some examples are already known and documented.

My main "concerns" would be, on the one hand, of a monument protection nature, i.e. to ensure that no monument protection ruins or even makes the project unaffordable; and secondly, of a building law nature: privileges that may have been granted to the building so far are likely to become history with the secularization.

If no state church law bridges conflicts between fire protection and monument protection anymore, one can learn the difference between profane and trivial ;-)