Room division "with little effort"

Good day, dear forum community,

I have been reading for a while and have already learned a lot from it, thank you very much for that!

My husband and I have been looking for residential property for us and our two small children for 10 months. Currently, I have my eye on a semi-detached house that is listed as having 4 rooms. However, these are not fully-fledged 4 rooms. I have two questions about this:

1) One of the four rooms is a converted attic that is open to the stairwell (with a small gallery overlooking the stairwell) — so it is not a fully-fledged room. How high are the financial costs to install a drywall partition instead of the gallery in the attic to obtain a room separated from the rest of the house?

3) According to the broker’s exposé, one of the two fully-fledged rooms on the first floor can be "divided with little effort." In my opinion, only a drywall can be built through the room (which has two windows), which would in any case "degrade" one half to a passage room because a second door is definitely not possible to install. Also, there is only one radiator in this room. Can a second radiator be installed "with little effort"?

Otherwise, the semi-detached house meets our requirements quite well, built in 2017, gas condensing boiler and photovoltaic system, no renovation backlog. The location and number of rooms represent a compromise we would make for financial reasons (yes, I know there are forum members who advise against any compromises, but after intensive searching and many disappointments, I no longer share this opinion. Therefore, it makes little sense to advise us to simply look for five fully-fledged rooms in the desired location, as these cost > 750,000 euros in our current place of residence and such offers are very rare.)

Thank you in advance for your answers! With many warm regards!

The location and the number of rooms represent a compromise that we would make for financial reasons (yes, I know there are forum friends who advise against any compromises, but after intensive searching and many disappointments, I no longer share this opinion.

No, I recommend (elsewhere, linking not allowed here) in "Das Zwischenhaus: ein Sprungbrett" to positively accept the Zwischenhaus, and then continue searching calmly from there (and to arrange oneself with discipline until then instead of trying to create the ideal situation).

Hello, dear Elephant,

"Building the dream house" is good! You are probably right about that. I also know the feeling of "making things worse by trying to improve them"... but if I leave everything in this house as it is and we don't use the attic room as a bedroom because it is open, we have no advantage over our current living situation — except that we own the property and no longer rent. Often it is decided for you anyway, because as a buyer you don't even get a chance. But I don't want to let fatalism arise.
Best regards!

Demand: You have 2 children and the house has 4 rooms. Why do you then need more rooms? We had an attic like the one you described, we built the drywall partition ourselves, it's not rocket science. It maybe cost around 300€ or whatever, but in any case, it's definitely affordable even for a professional.

Friends of ours had the attic done with the DG and it was around 4000-5000€ including the door and everything (plastering, adjusting the floor...). So far from 300€, but with house prices of 1,000,000 not a decisive factor.

The dividable room with 1 heater sounds more complicated. However, there are even electric heaters.

Well, it depends. We did the first part ourselves, the second was that the door at the bottom of the stairs was already there, third, there was nothing else to adjust and nothing to plaster because it was the attic and everything was drywall anyway. We only needed the drywall panels, filler, screws, and a bit of cable and light switches for the wall. You can of course spend money on everything.... or not^^.