To what extent do you consider living in old age when building?

If you really want to address the topic consistently, it starts with the choice of location and ends with the future maintenance costs. When you read here about what is being built, many houses will be unusable for retirees with mostly low income in 30-40 years. Sellable only if the location is right. Even now, in my town, a district capital in BW with 25,000 inhabitants, the old houses are clear slow sellers because the building fabric is simply just bad and only demolition is an option. This will not improve with the Climate Protection Plan 2050.

On the ground floor: wider doors, bathroom with floor-level 1 sqm shower, study can be converted into a bedroom. The upper floor can then be occupied by one child or rented out, connections for a second residential unit are available.

But to put it into perspective: Those who have built in the countryside and will probably only be able to sell their house well below its value, and those who perhaps do not like city apartments anyway, should maybe pay more attention to that.

But you also have to consider the regions; in Saxony this may be the case, but in the Cologne metropolitan area it looks a bit different... here people want to move to rural areas and prefer to drive a few minutes into the city. Moreover, we are talking about completely different land prices here; you can compare the standard land values of the Cologne surrounding area with your region...

We are already building our second and last house, and I want to live in it as long as possible. Especially since we are fitting it out very high-end; nothing draws me to the big city into some apartment with city noise and inconsiderate neighbors!

At the moment, I am concerned with the aspect of to what extent one should consider the situation in old age when planning the floor plan.

From my point of view: not at all!

You are currently building for yourself/yours and your immediate future; your current/medium-term needs. At your age, you cannot know at all what will be important/necessary in later years because: life cannot be planned ;)

If everything goes "normally" in life, there is no need to consider any uncertain disabilities and you have spent money pointlessly because you will leave the house feet first. If things do not go as hoped, everything is possible – from private insolvency, through barrier-free living to round-the-clock care.

Measured against the shrinking social benefits and low pensions in Germany, it is rather likely that you will eventually sell your single-family home and either downsize – this can be a new house construction, as well as the purchase of a condominium – or move into modern retirement residences, which score with additional services (nurses/round-the-clock care, etc.) according to your level of impairment.

So think about the here + now; later everything will probably be different anyway, as the life models of previous generations no longer exist ;)

Rhineland greetings

We are currently planning as well, and we are doing it the way grym and Bauexperte have already described. It makes no sense to invest such a large amount of money now for "someday, maybe." I also think that lifestyles, as Bauexperte called them, have changed. We need a house now that suits us. We are now assuming that we can estimate what will suit us in the coming years. And even that can change. That's life.

To make it clear: I do not assume that I will still be living in the same house in 30 years. Maybe it will be, maybe not. In my personal value system, this is not a goal that enjoys high priority. If someone here writes that he/she now has 240sqm of space and is prepared for all eventualities, "better safe than sorry," then all I can say is that this is a completely different mentality that does not align with ours at all.

We had seen it that way so far as well. Due to the immense property prices within the city limits, we have also made a compromise, which I currently find good and right. We are building mainly because of the children: there is simply no more space in our rental apartment, and renting a larger apartment costs more than paying off a single-family house in a neighboring village. But whether I still want to live there in 25 years, I don't know, and neither does my husband. Giving the house to a possibly interested child or renting it out were more our thoughts.

But then we also thought: if we don't plan any possibilities now, e.g., having a bedroom on the ground floor or a barrier-free large bathroom there, it is basically already clear that we will have to move out of there in old age – even if we might not want to :(