A tale of two houses

The last year has been weird for everyone. A year ago, most of Astrid’s family was at the Waldlehne, taking shifts to visit their mum or grandmother, Christel, in the hospital in Huckingen. I was there largely to keep things together by putting food on the table, etc. There hasn’t been a week since that I haven’t been there, keeping the lights on, and I moved in in March, when we still thought there was a possibility of keeping the house.

Things have moved on a lot since then. The insane property prices, amongst other things, put paid to that dream. But, great as the house is, it is also much too big for two people, and that’s without taking the garden into consideration.

We’ve been wanting to move in together for a while with things like Astrid’s office being in the south of Cologne, but more those property prices, putting us off. Our rents combined would hardly get us anything bigger than either of our flats. What were the alternatives?

Early on I’d said to Astrid that the house on Sengelsweg would also be a possibility, especially given Claudia’s and Michi’s apparent determination to move out. But, initially, given the state of the house she was dead against it. But we had time to think about it and also say goodbye to the Waldlehne.

We thought about the various possibilities: a flat together in either Köln or Düsseldorf; or a house somewhere between. But Astrid loves a garden: one of her favourite ways of switching off over the last year has been sweeping up the needles from the huge sequoia in front of the Waldlehne. But, at current prices, the most we could hope for would be a garden the size of a postage stamp, in a town where we know nobody. Not that we know anyone in Angermund any more! But the centre of Dusseldorf isn’t far, especially with the S-Bahn, and there is a huge garden at the Sengelsweg. And the house is big enough to have guests.