How much house is in it?

That all sounds like throwing money away and burning it. Usually, one would first check if the inventory can be used somehow. Is the basement usable? Maybe it just needs to be sealed. Are walls usable, pipes, etc. Simply tear it down and put up a prefab house – sorry if that sounds harsh – but that's pretty arrogant when you have so little equity.

What exactly do you want in a house? You already mentioned quite a few things in your member thread. Unfortunately, that confuses me a bit. What exactly is a Pen&Paper adventure and why does it need its own room? Can't you play something like that at the big dining table - meaning in the living room?

We quickly moved away from that idea when we looked at how much basements cost. By now, the living room feels pretty good for that in our minds.

One post before you, I wrote a little about the house and our ideas/hopes. But these are all values we got from various building diaries, model house exhibitions, and stacks of brochures. We don’t have a concrete offer yet because we first have to sit down with the mayor and the building authority to look at the development plan from 1990. They seriously only allow 1 full floor and a gable roof with a 45-55° angle on it. And I wondered why all the plots were still available. If we can get that down to 38 or 35°, then we could do something with it.

Usually, you would first check if you can somehow use the existing building. Is the basement usable? Maybe it only needs to be sealed. Are possibly walls usable, pipelines, etc.?

Yes, but as far as I understand, with an existing basement, the insulation values get tricky again because we would only reach KFW 55 max. And whether we use the subsidy or not (due to worsening conditions), I would still like to build as energy-efficiently as possible. That may still be a dream right now that will burst when we get an offer, but I’m still holding on to the hope that we can build a Kfw 40 house.

Besides, I’m actually leaning more toward the garage than the basement at the moment anyway. I think the considerations will only get more concrete once we have clarified the plot and actually have an offer in hand or really talk about what the house should look like later and what possibilities we would have. So far, it has more been about what requirements the plot should have.

"500,000 marks are today 250,000 euros" - we all know that this was converted 1:1. The interest rate was many times worse back then.

...interesting phenomenon that this is always claimed...whatever...off-topic...

Partial basement (50 sqm?

Not worth it, the savings are not 1:1 to the sqm.

Prefabricated double garages are already available from non-prefabricated house builders for 15,000€ (a friend built one)

Phew...that must be a metal hut...more realistically I estimate 20-30K EUR for a double garage.

At your stage of planning I would recommend not looking for any standard equipment from any prefab house providers. You would have to go way too much into detail to see what is really included and what you still need to add on. Just take 2,000€/sqm. This is a frequently used empirical value here in the forum. Sometimes more, sometimes less. In BW you won’t get much cheaper. And if you take that value, you will quickly realize that it doesn’t fit with 160 sqm and certainly not with 180 sqm. (5,000€ for upsizing is by the way "nothing")

We would also like a photovoltaic system and smart home to at least partially recover the costs of the air-water heat pump and be more independent from the electricity price. We are calculating about 25,000€ for that.

Photovoltaics depending on size...with often chosen just under 10 kW you’ll be at almost 15K EUR alone...Smart Home is a broad term. If you don’t want one of those pseudo-smart homes, that alone will cost 15 - 20K EUR extra in a "basic setup."

Now you will hear several opinions about the individual amounts. They may vary somewhat...but overall I think the ideas don’t match the budget.

20,000€ for a complete cat-proof fence

What kind of fence do you want? It can be done much (!) cheaper.

Your salary is good, a house is achievable. The equity is small, but others have already built with little equity. If the dream plot has also been found, it is no longer really about whether but about how.

Because of the large sums, it is easy to stop paying attention to 1000 euros. That is indeed the case in the end, but if you allow it at every opportunity and selection, it will be a bottomless pit.

Therefore, take your land, your ruin, and the development plan and see what the best solution is for you. What can still be made out of the existing structure? Always try to plan as small as possible. 160 sqm sounds good – 180 too much, etc.

Hmm, so we already took a pretty close look at the mentioned house for €289,000 and found that it actually has almost everything we would like. We don’t need wood-aluminum windows, nor especially nicely curved door handles or a walk-in shower. For us, plastic windows, standard doors, and a flat shower tray are fine. And in the guest WC on the ground floor, we definitely don’t need a shower. What we would like are electric shutters and 2 washbasins in the bathroom. Besides, the €289,000 is turnkey, but we would do the plastering and painting ourselves.

And the prefabricated garage is made of concrete elements. It doesn’t even look bad, and the electrical installation was retrofitted by the acquaintance. All in all, he paid just over €15k. It’s of course not from Zapf or another well-known manufacturer, but for a plain normal garage, I don’t really care. It just shouldn’t fall on my car at some point, but it looks pretty stable.

But as I said, we will look at the exact specifications of the house when the time really comes and it’s about the construction contract. The photovoltaic system and the garage don’t have to be done immediately either. And depending on whether you can maybe build a small garden shed, a carport would also do. We are not fixed on anything yet.

Regarding smart home, we would initially like to have the basic requirements so that we can gradually “upgrade” later. And yes, I’m currently listing many points that would have to be covered by ongoing salaries later, but these are possibilities that I’m exploring first, and it doesn’t all have to be done within a year. Not even within 2 or 3 years.

What kind of fence do you want? That can be done much (!) cheaper.

We had looked at a chain-link fence with a mesh diameter of 5x5 cm at a height of 1.80 m. On top, we would put smooth plexiglass tubes so that the cats slip down again when trying to hold on. That would also keep cats out from outside. If you have a tip for how we can secure 1,500 sqm more cheaply for cats, I’ll send you a big box of Merci.