The Apartment

Annika and I both feel that we have been very fortunate with our current apartment.  We booked it online based on its location to Annika's work and the few photos we had seen.  When we arrived we quickly realised that we had chosen well.  The apartment is only 3 years old, it is right next to a beautiful park and a U bahn station.  It is 15 minutes door to door for Annika to get to work.  I can cycle into the centre of Munich in about 10-15 minutes.  We can walk to 2 swimming pools as well as supermarkets, bakeries, butchers grocers etc. The apartment itself is light and roomy with under floor heating, excellent noise and thermal insulation.  We are on a fairly busy street but with the windows closed you can't hear a thing.  In fact the first morning spent hear I wondered why I couldn't hear church bells and thought we must be too far from any church not realising that the bells were peeling away as usual just not heard inside our flat.  After a few days the shine started to fade as we realised that the apartment had been furnished with exceptionally cheap furniture and that we had to take extra care when opening and closing draws in case they fell apart in our hands.

The apartment is a short stay agreement and come the end of March we have to find a more permanent abode.  This was supposedly one of my tasks, being the gentleman of leisure that I am, but Annika couldn't help herself and with the estate agent web sites listing in German she could access a lot more information than I. As an aside I should point out that there are some major differences to renting a place in Germany than back home.  The first is that agents charge a commission on finding you a place and they do not manage the rental agreement.  So, where as, in Australia the agent will take 12% of the rent for the duration of the tenancy, in Germany the agent will charge a one off commission and then have nothing further to do with the tenancy.  The rental contract being directly between the owner and the tenant.  This one off commission is expensive and can be as much as 3 months rent.  The next major difference is that when you rent a place you, more often than not, don't get a kitchen.  The kitchen will be empty of everything, with only some connections for water, waste, gas etc.  We knew all this when moved to Munich and knew that we would have to buy some furniture and possibly a kitchen when found our permanent address.

So now the good bit.  As we were so taken with the location of our temporary accommodation Annika tried looking for something close by, she also found a website listing places which weren't using agents.  Lo and behold, there in the exact same building we were living in was a place for rent.  We contacted the owners and were invited up stairs to view their place.  A few posts ago I mentioned that we had dinner with a couple we had just met and that there was some ulterior motive for doing so.  Well Christoph and Tania are our neighbours from up stairs and they are moving to the States for a couple of years for work.  They want to rent their new, beautifully fitted out and furnished apartment to a responsible, caring couple.  They couldn't find anyone so they have settled on us.  In truth they are a really nice couple and we have immediately become friends.  At the time of writing we have been for dinner twice and have plans for a third time before they leave.

To round it all up.  We get to live in their beautiful flat for the next 1 - 2 years, which is two floors up  but is by far better than the one we currently have.  It comes with an underground parking space (which I shall describe later as it a marvel of modern engineering) and a storage room all of which our current place does not have.  We don't have to pay an agent an exorbitant commission, we don't have to buy any furniture, the kitchen is all there and of exceptional quality and we don't have to change our postal address.  All this and it costs less than the place we are currently renting.  How good is that?  In truth it is still a bit more than what we had budgeted for based on Annika's single income but we can afford it for a year.  It just means either I will have to find a job or we will have to  continue o drink 1.50 Euro bottles of wine.