A flat with features

[migracja]

History repeats itself. I'm returning to the topic from the beginning of the blog, that is, to finding a place to live. This time I'm having trouble with flat availability again, but not because of high demand – I'm not searching in an attractive city, but in a less busy area – but instead because of my requirements regarding the flat itself. Once I check one requirement in the flat search engine, the number of matching offers drops from 73 to 10.

What is the thing that almost no flats have? Floor heating? A self-sufficient solar plant? A garden with a terrace? Jacuzzi? A set of golden cutlery? A hearth?

It's nothing like that. All I ask is kitchen furniture. A sink and a stove. If I ask about furniture in the entire house, all that remains is one advertisement in the 20km radius. Apparently, Germans are quite attached to their furnishings. Except those in the bathroom. You'd think that the toilet is a more intimate element of furniture than the kitchen sink, so it's more appropriate for it to travel together with the owner, but clearly I'm wrong, because toilets are available in all offered flats without the need to bring your own.

Compared to my own experiences in Poland, before I emigrated, it seems very strange. Sure, not all advertised flats had furniture there, but there wasn't such a dearth as there is here.

It seems Germans consider it strange for someone to want used furiture. At my last room viewing, my question "what will happen to the furniture?" was met with the answer "oh, we could get rid of them if you prefer". Why would I want to carry furniture all the way from the next town if the place already has a useable set?

In the case of a flat with a bare kitchen, the calculation is even more confusing. The choice is on one hand to live in a kitchen designed by someone else, and on the other to organize and pay for either the transport of the old furniture, plus cover the effort and money cost needed to move the furniture to the flat and to install it, and to take the risk that it's not correctly installed on the first try. The benefit of the latter is that the design will ideally be better. Judging by the available offers, I conclude that most people around here consider using someone else's design as the worse option.

I don't get it at all. But it could be because I don't stay in one place for long, so I don't reap the decades of benefits of a personalized kitchen layout. To lessen the bias, hereby I present the results of an informal survey among my friends: "is it weird that most flats for rent don't have anything in the kitchen?". Scotland: yes. Lithuania: yes. France: no. Italy: yes. Germany: no. The last person knows what they are talking about, for they are moving in right now.

I suspect there's an invisible part to this, not made clear in the offers. When someone moves in, someone else often moves out. It's sometimes possible to buy out the furniture from the previous person. How often is this emergency exit available? I have no clue. I'll talk about it once I succeed.