As soon as I'm away for a short moment, my lovely thread gets hijacked here :D
To answer your question : We are currently "pausing." The development of the building area is dragging on, the current schedule would be the earliest possible construction start in about exactly one year.
Regarding costs: Yes, the developments have overtaken us. We started planning back in mid-2020, we even still had the child benefit deadline in sight (!). Several delays later, we now partly have a plan that we would evaluate differently under current circumstances and probably still will.
We are still waiting for a cost estimate from a general contractor, but of course, that is just crystal ball gazing. What will happen in a year – who knows.
Since we still expect a price trend rather upward, we have been a bit more critical regarding the current room sizes.
We find the ground floor good as it is in terms of room sizes. Probably it wouldn’t even be noticeable if the house was 0.5m shorter here as well.
We currently see the most potential in the upper floor. All rooms are actually a bit too proper for our taste right now. A children's room with 14m² would suffice according to our current preference, the bedroom could be significantly smaller (we actually don’t want the currently planned room divider, we just like having a nice built-in closet). The bathroom is also very large, I believe about 16m². Certainly, about 4m² could be saved here. The children's bathroom also has some room for reduction.
A few weeks ago, we visited the Baufritz exhibition in Bavaria and took a look at two houses there, Lichtblick and Heimat 4.0. Beautiful examples of how you can create great rooms with wonderful furnishing and straightforward architecture/planning, which don’t have to be large at all. We found it very inspiring regarding room sizes for us.
-> So we have potential on the upper floor, on the ground floor we actually want to stay as is. A conceivable measure in our case would be to reduce the basic building envelope of the house and enlarge the bay window on the ground floor accordingly. Currently, only a small section protrudes on the south side, it could still be extended to a second side.
-> Another point that concerns us is that, although the entrance from the street side is visually the ultimate for us, the hallway situation on the ground floor is also more complicated because of it. An entrance from the side would make it possible for us not to have to access the study through the living room. (like for example in Baufritz Heimat 4.0, see attachment. Here, there would be a secondary kitchen, e.g., technical room with access from the hallway)
Difficult times.
