MENUMENU
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Work With Us
  • Our Favourite Tools

Little House On The Corner

DIY & Home Improvement

MENUMENU
  • Blog
  • Projects
    • Our Favourite Projects
          • DIY Outdoor Daybed with Canopy
          • DIY Outdoor Daybed With Canopy

          • DIY Epoxy Resin Dining Table
          • DIY Epoxy Resin Dining Table

          • 5 Floor Sanding Mistakes And How To Avoid Them | Little House On The Corner
          • What No One Will Tell You About Sanding Your Floors

    • Home Improvement & DIY
          • Hallway with Paean Black Front Door After Editing With Interior Presets for Lightroom by Little House On The Corner
          • How To Create A Home Renovation Budget

          • Floorsanding In Progress
          • What No One Will Tell You About Sanding Your Floors (& How We Did It)

          • How To Plan & Install Panelling | Little House On The Corner
          • How To Plan & Install Panelling

    • Painting & Decorating
          • painted wardrobe in Soumak by paint & paper library
          • How To Paint A Wardrobe

          • Dark Blue and Grey Painted Kitchen Cabinets
          • How To Paint Kitchen Cabinets + Tips For A Professional & Long Lasting Finish

          • What To Do When You've Chosen The Wrong Paint Colour?
          • What To Do When You’ve Chosen The Wrong Paint Colour & How To Fix It!

    • Furniture Upgrades
          • DIY Slatted Radiator Cover
          • DIY Slatted Radiator Cover

          • Beat Floor Lamp and Bar Cart
          • DIY Bar Cart

          • DIY Dining Room Bench | Little House On The Corner
          • DIY Dining Room Bench

    • Outside & Garden
          • DIY Logstore
          • DIY Log Store

          • DIY Slatted Garden Fence | Little House On The Corner
          • DIY Slatted Garden Fence

          • How To Lay A Gravel Driveway
          • How To Lay A Gravel Driveway

    • Free Printables
          • Cleaning Checklist - Free Printable
          • The Best House Cleaning Checklist

          • Free Printable Paper Houses for Advent Calendar
          • DIY Printable Advent Calendar Village

          • The Easy and Free Way To Organise Screws and Nails
          • The Easiest Way To Organise Screws And Nails

    • Craft & Art
          • DIY Pegboard
          • DIY Pegboard

          • DIY Modern Geometric Serving Tray
          • DIY Modern Geometric Serving Tray

          • DIY Guess Who Game - Setting Out Board | Little House On The Corner
          • DIY Guess Who Game

    • Cleaning & Organizing
          • Cleaning Checklist - Free Printable
          • The Only Cleaning Checklist You’ll Ever Need

          • DIY Floating Spice Rack | Little House On The Corner
          • DIY Floating Spice Rack

          • 30 Day Spring Clean Checklist - Little House On The Corner
          • 30 Day Spring Clean Challenge

    • Holidays & Festivities
          • DIY Giant Star and Snowflake Light | Little House On The Corner
          • DIY Giant Star and Snowflake Light

          • Free Halloween Printable Book Covers
          • Halloween Book Covers (Free Printable!)

          • Gingerbread style paper advent calendar village - Little House On The Corner
          • DIY Printable Advent Calendar Village

  • House Tour
        • Our Edwardian House
        • Our Edwardian House (1st Home)
        • Our Berlin City Centre Apartment
        • Our Berlin City Centre Apartment (2nd Home)
        • Take The Tour | Our Art Nouveau Apartment | Little House On The Corner
        • Our Berlin Art Nouveau Apartment (3rd Home)
        • berlin riverside apartment house tour
        • Our Berlin Riverside Apartment (4th Home)
  • Shop
    • The Little Corner Shop
    • Shop Our First Home
    • Shop Our Current Home
    • Our Favourite Amazon Finds

Why We Really Sold Our Dream Apartment

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

I know you’ve all been waiting for the behind the scenes nitty-gritty details of why we really sold our apartment and, as promised, we’re sharing everything.

Just a quick warning though, it’s not pretty! (You might want to skip to the end if you want to hear something positive!)

Deciding to completely uproot our lives and sell our apartment probably came as a bit of a surprise but. behind the scenes, it’s something we’d been thinking about for quite a while. 

DIY Epoxy Resin Dining Table - How To Tutorial

There’s no denying that our apartment looks amazing. It’s large (about 1.5 times the size of our 4-bed Edwardian semi in Manchester), has stunning high ceilings with ornate plasterwork (including naked ladies in the living room ceiling), it’s packed with period features, has great transport links and, best of all, we have amazing neighbours, too. 

But looks can be deceiving and all of this comes at a price though. Literally. 

hallway with sanded floorboards and paean black front door

In international comparison, Berlin is still an affordable city but that doesn’t mean it’s a cheap place to live. Rents and property prices have been increasing rapidly over the last few years, gentrification is an ever-increasing issue with many locals being priced out of the city and the arty, gritty vibe that makes the city special is slowly disappearing. 

Now, none of this is meant to sound miserable. If we lived in any city in Germany it would still have to be Berlin. It’s multicultural, vibrant and there’s always something going on which are all things we love about living here. 

Master Bedroom with Inchyra Blue walls | Little House On The Corner

But back to our apartment. As amazing as it is, why did we decide to move on to something new?

Most of us to know better to believe everything we see on the internet and whilst we are always honest here, there’s always behind the scenes stuff that you don’t see.

After all, nobody really wants to read about day to day misery, see the piles of laundry in the corner of our bedroom or the complete chaos we sometimes live in when tackling 5 DIY projects in one go (although that’s one messy aspect we do occasionally share).

So, why did we really sell our dream apartment?

We’re not ‘forever’ people

I totally understand that there are people out there who would find constantly moving to new cities and homes stressful but we actually like new adventures. This is probably down to the fact that we also love renovating and transforming our homes, which is why inevitable we do get to the point where we’d like a new challenge.

We enjoy living in Berlin but, without giving too much away (we don’t know what will happen yet and planning anything long-term at the moment is almost impossible), we don’t think that we’ll be staying here longterm! 

DIY Modern Geometric Serving Tray

Money

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the financial aspect of owning a home didn’t occasionally seem daunting. The largest part of our income is spent on our apartment. We’re constantly renovating, we have huge maintenance bills and our mortgage is massive, too.

Obviously, these are all costs we knew about before we bought the apartment so the financial pressure only played a small part in the reason we decided to sell.

There was however another money-related reason we decided to move on. The value of our apartment increased and by selling now, we’ll make a great profit which will hopefully allow us more financial independence and freedom to do the things we love like travel (if we’re ever allowed to again) or just not stress when another bill comes through the letterbox.  

We didn’t enjoy living there

As much as the two reasons I just mentioned do play a huge part in our reason to sell, the biggest reason of all is that I just didn’t enjoy living there.

I know that that probably sounds like a mad thing to say, but it honestly just goes to show that you should always remember that there’s another side to all of the gorgeous interiors you see on places like Instagram. 

On paper, the apartment is more than we could have ever wanted. There’s no denying that it is amazing but there are some serious drawbacks when it comes to living there. Our internet connection was shocking (after over 3 years of waiting it was finally renewed the week we moved out!), the building itself still needs a lot of work and the loft (which is directly over us) will be converted into flats which means that we’ll be living on a full-on building site for at least a year. 

Committee meetings are the stuff nightmares are made of

Owning any type of property comes with certain obligations, Obviously, there are bills to pay and there’s maintenance to take care of, but when you own an apartment, there are a lot of other things that become part of your day-to-day life, too. 

DIY Epoxy Terrazzo Dining Table

You have to deal with fun things like committee meetings (which can be really unpleasant and miserable things), you have a lot of neighbours you have to get on with and making any kind of decision involves a lot of back and forth and even when things are decided it by no means guarantees that they will happen.

I personally wouldn’t buy an apartment again. I wish someone had given us advice and had told us about what problems could arise and what issues we could face when owning an apartment.

This isn’t about me always getting my own way (which is something I’m fine with), what I didn’t realise is that people would do things that are detrimental to the value of the building and therefore our apartment, too.

We didn’t realise how long everything would take

If you’ve ever tackled a home improvement or had any building work done, you’ll know that things have a way of taking longer than you expect. We’ve been DIYing and improving our homes for almost 10 years now and you’d think we’d used to delays and things not going completely to plan but nothing quite prepared us for what lay ahead with our apartment.

Obviously, it takes time to agree on changes or major building work but there were huge and completely unnecessary delays, like waiting 3 years for a new internet connection, that was basically down to a useless management company. 

Bedroom with white walls and bedding

Your facilities company is everything!

I cannot stress enough how vital a good facilities company is to keep everything moving and working. Seriously, it’s hard to imagine just how important it is. 

The management company we had for roughly the first year signed contracts which were wrong. Years later we’re still sorting mismanagement issues. They approved overpriced quotes, made decisions that were detrimental to the structure of the building and we’re all round just incompetent which can become extremely stressful when you’re dealing with them on a day-to-day basis.

Legal issues

OMG. I had no idea how s**t people could be. Okay, so I did know, but it’s easy to forget just how evil people sometimes are. I obviously can’t go into a huge amount of detail given that a lot of legal things are still ongoing but here are a few things to give you an idea of some of the things going on behind the scenes. 

We had amazing neighbours who all wanted to improve the building and make changes that would benefit the building and the people living there – except for one. 

One person that owned a tiny part of the building kept suing the rest of us for the most random things. He’d rip out original features like a door to the communal hallway and when we all complained started to sue us for pretty much anything he could think of! It was just never-ending. There were also some completely mad rumours flying around which ranged from things like him wanting to start a brothel or a poker club in the cellar! Needless to say, they were completely unsubstantiated and legally couldn’t ever happen, but they aren’t exactly things that make you sleep better at night! 

colourful garden table and chairs

I realise that this all sounds really miserable but it’s honestly not meant to.

Yes, we had a really stressful time that actually got so bad at one point that it started to affect my health but we also had the privilege of living in a stunning apartment in the middle of Berlin for almost 4 years. 

We had lots of fun times there and we made great new friends. Oh, and we made a profit, too. And, best of all, we have a new and exciting adventure to look forward to! Hope you stick around and join us – what we have planned is going to be lifechanging!

Have you ever lived somewhere that turned out not to be what you expected? Have you had problems with your neighbours? Did living in your own home live up to your expectations?

PS. Don’t forget that you can take the full video tour of our apartment on our new YouTube channel!

  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Christine 4 Comments

the PAST
the FUTURE

Subscribe To Our Newsletter

Sign up with your email address for secret projects, DIY advice & lots of fun!

Privacy Policy

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Comments

  1. Eina says

    20/05/2021 at 17:58

    Thank you for sharing all this with us. It is very helpful to understand the realities that apartment owners can face anywhere, in any city. I usually loved living in city flats as a renter, living in several countries so far, but also had the experience of one nightmare person moving into a wonderful building and changing everything. Plus bad management that led to a neighbuor building being evacuated because repeated complaints that indicated a huge problem were ignored.

    Living in a 19th century wood house right now, with lovely older neighbours. Finding competent craftspeople who have time is an entirely different issue….

    Reply
    • Christine says

      21/05/2021 at 07:32

      Thank you for taking the time to comment, Eina! Good neighbours make such a huge difference and (with very few exceptions) we’ve always been so lucky to have had the best neighbours we could ask for! It’s a shame that living in the apartment didn’t work out but that does mean that there are new adventures ahead! We can’t wait to share our plans (trying to work out a few behind the scenes logistics at the moment) but hope to share more in the next couple of weeks!
      Cx

      Reply
  2. Stacey says

    09/04/2021 at 16:24

    Bad neighbours can ruin anything! Sorry you had so many issues, and congrats on moving on so successfully. You made a big difference to that building for the future.

    Reply
    • Christine says

      09/04/2021 at 17:54

      It’s a bit sad but it’s really not all bad, Stacey! We made some amazing friends in that building, learned a lot and lived in a fab apartment for a few years! Looking for a new challenge now which I’m sure will also be fun!
      Cx

      Reply
Painting Checklist

Our Favourite Tools

*Contains Affiliate Links*

Things To Know

ABOUT US

CONTACT US

DISCLAIMER

Privacy Policy

Shop Our Home!

OUR FAVOURITE TOOLS

SHOP OUR HOME

Disclaimer

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Please read our full disclaimer here!

Let’s Be Friends!

Keep Up To Date!

Subscribe for exclusive content and tutorials!

Thank you!

Copyright © 2023 · Little House On The Corner · This Website is powered by Cloudways and the Genesis Framework