Partial renovation of a 2002 corner terraced house experiences?

: Thanks for the answer. Interesting point of view. May I ask why you would plan with the horizon to change the house? So what motivation would there be for you to say: come on, we’re changing the house specifically? Thanks and best regards!

So what motive would there be for you to say: come on, let's switch houses concretely?

Change of needs. For example, we currently have 200 sqm in an old building, which we need even with home office and 4 children. I love our house, but I don't want to grow old here because the house is too big for retirement and spans two floors. Our idea is to move into a significantly smaller bungalow as soon as all the children have left home (but that will still take 15-20 years, so for now we are renovating first)...

Our idea is to move into a significantly smaller bungalow

You can plan whatever you want. Experience shows that it's very difficult to estimate needs over 20 years. Especially if you have lived in a house where the children grew up. You don’t transplant an old tree. So it might be your plan for the future that will eventually be discarded. Who knows what will happen by then.

To get back to the topic.

How much effort is it to install underfloor heating? The house isn’t that old. If you have an anhydrite screed with a reasonable construction height, it’s no problem to remove it and install underfloor heating. With other types of screed, it depends on how much effort is involved.

I recently visited an acquaintance who bought a townhouse in Erlangen. Terrible. Just the steep and narrow stairs alone. Plus 4 floors with a basement that also got flooded. Paid 400k for such a cramped box. You can’t even drive a car up to it. Impossible. With something like that, you can imagine not wanting to live there forever.

As soon as you start working on the tiles and maybe even completely on the screed, it becomes a big, dusty affair. Then there’s a small wall added and this and that during the renovation, a bit of different wiring or something similar, and then you might as well completely gut the house and renovate it however you want. But you probably didn’t want that, also for cost reasons, which is why an eventual change of property should be considered. I would leave the heating as it is and discuss with your wife (see ) whether and where I would want a different floor; maybe a good compromise will be found. Depending on the situation, you might be able to put something directly on the tiles or similar, or tile over them, or adjust just one room, which could be problematic because of the doors and other things. Underfloor heating is not a "deliverance" from an evil, but merely an alternative way of heating that must fit the overall situation; almost anything can be done. Depending on the situation, you might also be able to partially remove this wall and leave a baseboard/half wall standing to achieve the desired openness without tearing up the floor.

May I ask why you would plan to change the house with the horizon?

Because it is part of the course of time that children grow up and parents get older. Houses are immobile and inflexible, they don’t evolve with you, and changing is more economical than remodeling. A terraced house of this size is basically a very marketable property class; families with children as potential buyers will be available even when you as a family enter a new phase.

So what motivation would there be for you to say: come on, we are specifically changing the house?

When the kids go from residents to visitors, what’s the point in giving up the convertible and keeping the station wagon? YOLO, “at 66 years, life begins ...”. Besides, it is also dementia prevention to transplant yourself several times in life. A house is a convertible asset; it should not “serve” stagnation. As a building consultant, I increasingly deal with people like or who are open to more vital alternatives than listening to the ticking of the wall clock and who do not consider installing a stairlift under new architectural impulses. Here the same applies as with tiles: don’t live past your dear wife! Cf. also “Do you really only build once?”, “Wrong paths of foresighted house planning” and “When is it time to think about ‘aging building’?” (including the quotation marks to google). At the same place you will find in “The intermediate house: a springboard” the role your current house plays in the market, and in “Developer offers: beware of special requests” (as well as here in the forum in my posts about the “usual suspects” / Weisenburger, Wengerter, Werner & Co.) the difficulties of tuning intermediate houses are explained.