I signed my contract!

it is sadly even smaller than I remembered

this is all I have as a kitchen (it ends where the left side of the picture ends)

looks like a pretty decent amount of cabinet space, at least?

not for what I expected. Remember that one of the big "cabinets" houses a fridge. There is also an inbuilt oven.

but there is space to place a large buffet or similar against the right wall

the current tennant has a dining table there

This is from the living room. The width is 4.5 meters, that window to the left of the edge is 2.15 or so

I didn't make a picture of the bedroom, it is nothing interesting - 3x4.5 meter, dark, and there was the personal stuff from the tennant in there, I wanted to give her privacy and not post it on the Internet

This is the piece of garden adjacent to the terrace, where I can make a small herb garden

all in all, the actual living space is more like 40 sq m than 50, it is more on paper because the law in Germany allows to count parts of non-living area to the overall sum, weighted by some percentage

but now comes the reason I got this place

this is where I plan to spend as much of my time as possible

and given the mild Heidelberg winters, this can really be a lot of time

Nice!

That's a fancy coffee machine...

it's the tennants, I at least don't need one

Nice patio!

that's why I got it

The kitchen is 3x3 meters

I wonder if I will be able to get everything I need into the kitchen cabinets

if not, maybe I should build a kitchen island in the middle, to double as a dining table

Is that sort of thing usually acceptable in Germany? I know my mom was always really conscientious about changing the places she rents... even just paint color.

I won't be an inbuilt change - not the kind of island with water and electricity

just placing cabinets in the middle with some nice surface

Ah. I think I've even seem mobile ones...

@rumtscho ohhh secret fridges, I get it

I don't know why, but they are common here

the problem is that there is no separate room for a pantry, so all my food - fridge-worthy, non-fridge, and fruits - has to stay inside

Yeah, I have cabinets as pantry too.

I think my dad's house is the only one I've ever lived in that had a separate pantry room. The kitchen was up against the stairs to the second floor, so the space under the stairs was the "pantry".

My apartment in Houston-ish had an actual pantry!

I guess it wasn't really much more space than another stack of cabinets would've been, though, just a door in the kitchen with shelves behind it.

sorry, was on the phone with my father for all that time

in the house where I was doing catsitting, there was a real pantry

maybe 1x2 meters

with a door - a whole room between the kitchen and the guest toilet

it had shelves on both long walls, one full of food, the other of the nonfood one needs in a home. Cleaning supplies and such.

Yeah, I have a friend with a "laundry room" that doubles as a pantry... one side of the room is the washer/dryer, the other side is shelf-stable food.

Is your dad excited about the new place?

I wouldn't say "excited", but generally positive

I got a bit angry at my grandmother though

Oh, why?

I was trying to explain how I will miss arranging the stuff I wanted

I will probably have to give up the idea of either having a dining table, or a couch/lounge corner inside

and she told me "you will have a bed there, a kitchen, a desk, you don't need anything more"

she has no idea how much stuff I have or don't have, what I want to do in this place, how I have dreamed for years to move into a place large enough to do things which are impossible in this tiny room here, or how I feel too tightly squeezed in and hate it how I have to listen to the fridge when falling asleep, because there is no wall between the kitchen and the only room with its sleeping corner

and worse, she doesn't care

she just orders me to be happy with a bed, desk, and kitchen, with a tone which suggest that wanting anything more than that is ridiculous

I think that's when you just decide to let her think what she wants and smile and do what you want.

Oh, I will sure do what I want

but this time she got under my skin

sometimes when I tell my family something, I want to be heard, and what comes back is waves of disapproval

or sometimes not disapproval, but dismissal

Yeah. I know what you mean. Sorry. That's no fun when you're excited about something new and then you run into a negative force who sucks all the fun out.

"You don't need anything more than a bed and a desk and a stove - see, I solved your problem. If you still complain, you must be an idiot, because you don't understand my simple solution."

luckily, I spent more time talking to my father than to her, and he is not like that

He didn't seem to be when he stopped by the other day. :)

He used to be a bit more insensitive earlier, but then my grandmother (the other one, his mother) moved to live in a village close enough for him to visit her 2-3 times per month, and this changed his character considerably :)

Honestly, I think it's interesting how house priorities have changed to a degree... a desk is completely not a priority to me at all... I have a laptop at home and I use it on the couch, in front of the TV. We have a desk because we also have a desktop computer but it's going away when we turn the office more officially into "Ben's room".

I wouldn't give up my two-monitor-workplace. It is too much a part of my geek identity.

HA HA. Well, I have that at work... I don't do a lot of "work" at home, though... and I'm guessing you do.

I also don't know if I should get a TV or not. I currently use one of the two large monitors for watching, and it is OK.

Well, I don't know how much job-work I will have to do when I am finished with the dissertation, I hope not much. But still, I can sometimes program for fun, or edit photos, or something like that. Or my work as the accountant for my sports club.

We have one but we don't have it connected to any sort of actual TV really... no cable or satellite. We have a Roku and Netflix/Hulu/HBO/Amazon Prime etc.

yes, I watch Netflix usually. One abonnement is enough for me.

Sadly, it is quite limited in Germany, almost no films worth watching

but when one becomes hooked to a series, it provides relaxation and entertainment for many evenings to come.

@rumtscho I know people often talk about issues with listen mode vs fix mode, but that's like... fix mode where the solution is "you don't have a problem"...

@Jefromi yes, she is outside the listen/fix mode framework.

She just makes decisions in a tenth of a second - decisions, conclusions, I don't know what to call them - and believes in them firmly.

When I brought my ex home on vacation, we had some plans to get around the country, I was telling her about them

and when I reached the "and then we want to hike for two days on the Balkan before continuing to the sea" part she just cut me off, crying "you will get lost!"

she really acted as if she could forbid us to go there and hike

she didn't even consider how much of an actual risk it is, how much experience I have hiking, how much experience he might have, how we have made longer hikes together before, how we are going to prepare, etc.

It was this "you are going to get lost" and from there she was unstoppable in doing everything from straight commands to manipulation to stop us

but even before starting this phase of doing something to stop me, the part which makes me angry is her first reaction. Curt, determined, annoyed. She just barks it. "You don't need anything more." or "You are going to get lost." Like a clicheed drill sergeant saying "fifty pushups, now!"

anyway, enough complaining of my grandmother.

she has her sweet sides too, and I am probably painting a very one sided picture of her right now.

no worries, I've certainly seen rushes to judgment like that from my grandmother too.