In January 2019 we started looking for a new apartment. The contract for the one we lived in was ending on the first of March, and we didn’t want to extend it for another six months. Anyone who lives in Berlin or any other major European city knows that the search for an apartment is quite a serious problem: there are few good apartments, and many people who want them. And prices are increasing rapidly. So just the thought of looking for an apartment causes stress and the desire to just renew the contract again. But I think we were very lucky.
I knew beforehand that many apartments would not make it to the listing website, so during one of the viewings I asked the agent directly if there were any other apartments with the same parameters in this or the neighboring building. There were three of them: only one of them was on the website and the other two hadn’t been advertised yet. We looked at the first two apartments for 10 minutes and were not very impressed: now I don’t even remember how they looked. But as soon as we entered the third apartment, we knew that this was the one.
Honestly, the first thing I saw in this apartment was a huge terrace and the view from it. On my first visit I glanced at the rest of the space, although I mentally noted the black kitchen, which was still in the process of assembling. Not the most adult and reasonable approach to the choice of housing, but it was so: my husband and I decided that we want to live in an apartment, seeing only its terrace. It is worth mentioning here that the apartment we had lived in for two and a half years before had no balcony, and every summer (and it is in Berlin from April to the end of September) I watched with undisguised envy how other people lived their balcony life: having breakfast, sitting with laptops, meeting sunsets with a glass of wine and grilled vegetables. So, having a balcony was my main requirement in the search for apartments, and apartments without any balcony I didn’t even want to consider. I will make a separate note about the balcony, but here I would like to talk about the apartment itself.
In the evening of the same day when we visited the apartment, we prepared an application form for consideration and have already looked more closely at the floor plan and photos of rooms, which we took while visiting.
We were approved and that meant we were definitely moving in in two weeks. We had practically no furniture of our own, and we decided to leave the few things we bought in the last apartment. At this point we made a few mistakes. First, we decided to do the entire move by ourselves, and second, we underestimated the amount of stuff we would take with us. That was very presumptuous.
If you ever get the idea that a regular station wagon is enough to carry a 55-inch TV, run away from it! I don’t know what we were thinking, but yes, we shoved the TV into the car and it got stuck there. Stuck in such a way that it took us an hour and cutting through the box and Styrofoam to get the TV out of the car. We got the TV safely to the apartment, but then the car had to be cleaned from the Styrofoam and pieces of cardboard for a long time. We had to drive back and forth between the apartments, each time overloading the car with boxes and all sorts of things so that there was barely any room left for us. And I thought we were minimalists and didn’t have that much stuff.
The move came at the cost of our backs, our hands, as well as the cost of lost remote control and my husband’s socks. Not to mention the cost of carsharing every night. Afterwards we did the math and realized that hiring someone to do the hardest part of the move for us might have been more expensive, but it would have saved us a lot of nerves and energy.
Not having our own furniture also meant that even before the move, we had to buy our first ever bed, decide on a dining table, and choose from a thousand gray sofas. The surprise for us was the fact that if the furniture store is not Ikea, the delivery can take several months. This imposed its limitations on the choice and we really preferred the furniture that had a delivery time of at least 3-6 weeks (rather than 12-16).
Even though we chose furniture with faster delivery, the first few days we had to sleep on a mattress on the floor, and the main items of furniture in the living room were a desk with a computer, a folding Ikea table for the balcony and 6 chairs. A week after moving in we had a large closet delivered to our bedroom, and I was even glad that there was no other furniture yet, because the details of the future closet took up all the free space.
To understand what size table or sofa we should choose, I decided to make a plan with the arrangement of furniture. Here I want to say that back then I knew much less about ergonomics and the specifics of arranging certain elements. My layout came from different longstanding wishes rather than an understanding of how we would actually use the space. I wanted to make the dining table the centerpiece of the living room. I had pictures in my head of friends coming over for dinner and all of us sitting around that table together. In the previous apartment, the kitchen was a separate room and the table stood there, so even a nice dinner still turned into a gathering in the kitchen which was isolated from the living room. And I also really wanted to put the couch closer to the window, so that when it rains I could hear the sound right from the couch ( of course with a book in hand and tea on the table).
In the bedroom we put a large closet of three sections, one section for me, one for my husband and one section for storing documents, papers, various electronics and other small things that always need space. On the floor plan which we received from the landlord, the central part of the apartment (where the entrance from the hall into the living room) was given for a dining area and right next to the window was a table. I didn’t want to block the access to the terrace with the table, but I wanted to put the table closer to the kitchen, so I chose a place for it in the middle of the opening to the kitchen. This created restrictions on the choice of sofa. The sofa had to be small in length.We looked at a lot of different store websites and made our top 8 sofas and from that list, we chose the one that best fit us. But even this small sofa was sticking out from behind the wall. Overall it wasn’t too bad because the palm tree and floor lamp stood nicely behind the sofa, and for Christmas there was a Christmas tree and it turned out to be cool and cozy in its own way.
Another my wish was to hide the TV and make a whole wall with posters and pictures. I told you about how it came to life here.
Some of the details changed, but we lived with this arrangement of furniture for almost two years. Not on the first try, but we hung ceiling lights in all the rooms, we changed our plans for the dining room table position every few months, the desk traveled around the apartment, and the chairs twirled around the table. An art wall was finally created, and two sideboards were added to it. Only the couch stood in its place until one day I decided to turn it around and rearrange it a bit. This led to thoughts of changing the couch to something more open and modular, as well as another little rearrangement and change. There will be a separate post about that.
By the way, because of the rearrangement, I found the headphones my husband lost a few months ago. Turns out they had fallen behind the cushions and were lying under the seat cushion. And we had long since given up hope and ordered new headphones. So changes and rearrangements are always a plus 🙂
If you like my vision of a cozy and nice-looking interior and want to make your home more pleasant with my help, you can book one of my interior services. I will be happy to help you create the home of your dreams.
