Buy now or wait a little longer?

City and countryside don’t have the same gradient everywhere. There are metropolitan areas with a big city (or even several) and a commuter belt, where the levels of centrality fade like the rings of a tree; and there are regions with wannabe district towns, where the decline is less steep. My hometown Pampa City (my mother, a native capital plant, calls it "Kuhbläke") has a barracked volunteer fire brigade, those intermediate stages exist too. Here, apart from the Rhine and Westerwald, there is practically nothing, yet I have experienced duller places closer to Frankfurt. And the border zone still exists, a whole one and a half generations after the fall of the Wall.

I would like to emphasize that I apparently could not distinguish volunteer fire departments from professional fire departments, #because# the local one appears very professional with its large station and its contingent, which we could admire, among other things, during a bomb disposal in 2024. At city festivals in the PI district, they are always present from the district with vehicles for the kids to climb on, possibly also for recruiting :-) Despite my ignorance, I have no intention of making any negative judgments. In Hamburg, the (professional) fire department is connected with the emergency medical service, and there I have had mixed experiences with the emergency medical service in a professional context. So not everything is great either. Last but not least, apologies again for the digression.

.. but a volunteer fire department 24/7 and a town hall.

Yes, we love it here. Everything is very pretty here, and for example, in the town hall, due to the friendliness, one feels as if in a different universe than in Hamburg.

Well... on the one hand, friendliness is primarily an individual component, and there will also be friendly employees in Hamburg. On the other hand, there is, of course, also a difference between a citizen's office in the countryside, where not much is going on, and the citizen's office of a big city, where it’s like a pigeon coop.

Things have to go quickly there, a correspondingly decisive tone accelerates the process.

Both have advantages and disadvantages. I was once on vacation on the Baltic Sea with ear pain and traveled from Usedom to Greifswald because the next emergency room was there... On Friday at 12:30 PM, I could only be referred to Heringsdorf and Wolgast... 70 km one way...

How unpleasant! I hope the ear is feeling better! The care planning has something to do with the consolidation of hospital care by the previous government and makes some sense, but is disadvantageous for sparsely populated/rural areas. Access to outpatient specialists is to be made even more difficult in the future with a primary care physician system, which will push even more people to emergency rooms during regular working hours. -- In my personal experience, government employees here are across the board friendlier than in the big city; whether that has something to do with briskness, one can only speculate. ;) But it certainly has something to do with demands and volume. Now I will really stop, otherwise I will get an off-topic fine :eek:

12m² children's room, 10m² bathroom, 16m² bedroom, 10m² hallway and stairs. I still end up with 72m² upstairs and thus 144 for the house...

How small is the downstairs supposed to be? If I subtract 8m² for the office, 8 for the utility room, and 10 for the foyer, then there are still 46m² left for the kitchen and living room. A reasonable kitchen for 5 people is 16m², leaving 30m² for the living area and dining table... I find that small. You have to be tricky everywhere so you don’t completely clutter up.

I would rather save on the fittings than on the square meters. You can often retrofit fittings later, even if not 100% perfectly. The house, on the other hand, can’t be made bigger later...

You’re focusing too much on the 2 main floors. Now add a basement/partial basement and an attic. The basement houses the technical equipment and the office. On the ground floor there is a guest bathroom (with a shower for 5 people), living room, dining area and kitchen. On the first floor then 2 children’s rooms and the parents’ bedroom (which don’t have to be 16 sqm), as well as the main bathroom. In the attic then the bedroom for the oldest child. They will be happy to maintain their pubescent mess up there and the parents still have short ways to the smaller children. Later they can swap rooms. Dormers can somewhat relieve the attic from its cramped feeling caused by sloping ceilings. And now you have 120-140 sqm and need a smaller plot.