Having just signed a contract on an apartment in Düsseldorf I feel that there are a number of considerations I should warn you about. Good thing: Usually the bills are included in the rent price, or Warmmiete as they like to say over here, hurrah, no council tax, no heating bills, no electricity or communal area maintenance bills hurrah! Bad thing: everything else.
Generally apartments (and houses) are rented unfurnished, properties equipped with 70?s brown sofas and flock wallpaper tend to command twice the price of a bare equivalent. But renter beware unfurnished means UNFURNISHED, no curtains, no light fittings, everything but the kitchen sink is removed. No wait a minute they took that too. Yes it?s true. When Klaus and Katrin move out of their apartment (maybe because Klaus jr is on the way) they dismantle and remove the kitchen! How much of a pain in the A55 is that?
I have been trying to figure this one out, how did this become the norm? (Fortunately they leave the bathroom suite intact.)
I see a number of problems: i) your kitchen is designed to fit into the room, the right number of cupboards to fit along the wall, etc. what is the likelihood that the apartment you move to has the same size and shape of Kitchen (although I wouldn?t put it past the Germans to come up with standard kitchen sizes that home builders must adhere to. ?Ve haf vays of makeeng your kitchen fit.?). So your lovely kitchen suite doesn?t fit your kitchen. And when you tried to buy an additional cupboard to fit the larger room you found MFI no longer stock your kitchen in light oak, so you will have to settle for beech. Now you have a patchwork kitchen suite.
ii) Inconvenience. I have seen kitchens being installed and I can attest that whilst they are engineered to be simple to construct, the gap between theory and practice is large. Now I don?t know whether German kitchen manufactures go for more of a Lego type approach, but if not the thought of taking the kitchen apart, packing it up, and rebuilding it seems like the worst job ever (especially to a DIY-ophobe like me) Of course if they do opt for the Lego approach this could make moving far simpler as you could dismantle your kitchen and rebuild it into a large truck to move the rest of your possessions in.
iii) More inconvenience. When moving into a property your average first time renter is faced with the task of installing a kitchen. Now I am sure that you can get Pogenpohl or Smallbone of Devises to do you a nice custom job, but generally even a small kitchen, plus appliances runs to several thousand euros. And how long does Joe KitchenFitter take to install your kitchen? Probably longer than you want to wait (10 minutes).
iv) Relationship stress. So Hans and Gretel each live alone, fall in love at some beer festival or other and decide to get a place together. Now they face the biggest trial of their relationship, one which no British couple has to face, thank god. Whose kitchen should they install in the new pad? Of course if it were in Britain the answer is obvious, Hans (if he even had a kitchen and not just a bin for empty take away boxes) wouldn?t really care, its not like he?d be spending any time there. But remember where we are. The country whose language has no word for compromise (apart from ?die Kompromisslösung?, but notice it has the word ?lösung? in there so roughly translated this means ?he who compromises loses?, probably).
I envisage Hans and Gretel standing infront of all their combined kitchen units picking one thing at a time, much like junior school football captains choosing teams. I pity the poor cutlery drawer that doen?t make the cut.
Needless to say I went out of my way to find that most illusive of properties, the unfurnished flat with Kitchen.
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