My wife and me moved to our new house at March 2nd 2007. Find below some pictures and more in my House Building Flickr photo set.

We found the real estate about 1 year before we moved in, around Feb/Mar 2006. It’s at the border of Munderkingen, one of the smallest towns in Germany with roughly 5000 inhabitants. We immediately decided to buy it because of the very calm location and great view.

Next was to find someone who builds our house. We finally decided to go with Manuel Kirstein Baubetreuung, which was a very wise decision now that I can look back on our successful house building endeavor. Here’s the historic picture showing him, my wife and me after signing the contract (no, no, it’s not us being small, but him being tall).

In July, the building actually began:

Of course, just like every German house builder, we had to place a sign that trespassing is prohibited – it felt like claiming my land 🙂

Our (fabulous!!!) construction manager Erwin Gerber, my father-in-law (who helped us a lot and whom we jokingly used to call “assistant of the construction manager”) and me inspecting the basement:

The house with the basement and ground floor done:

A few weeks later, the roof is in place:

… that’s when we celebrated the topping-out cereomony with craftsmen and neighbours:

Afterwards, the windows got integrated and a lot of work happened inside. I already wrote about myself setting up a LAN infrastructure in our house. The other thing I did myself was to wall in the bathtub. According to the tiler who later had to fix my mistakes, the result was almost perfect 🙂

It was quite spectacular when the company (BauGrund Süd) came who drilled 2x 100m holes for our geothermal heating system:

With the heating in place, it took only some more weeks to get almost everything done inside to be able to move in. This is a rather new picture of our house from where the terrace will hopefully soon be in place (I am sitting behind the top left window while writing this post – can you spot my monitor’s back?):

This is the view outside from the top middle room:

The whole building project worked out very well. We had a good team we could trust (Manuel Kirstein and Erwin Gerber and all the craftsmen). Of course, there were problems, but everyone took care that they get fixed in a good way.

We enjoy living in our new house very much. Every day we realize that the architecture was well thought out. If I remember correctly, we spent more than 4 weeks on figuring out the best architecture before the building started.

It was a huge work and I am happy that it’s done. I spent long nights and weekends on all sorts of tasks and never want to build a house again. Nevertheless, I’d never want to miss the experience, it also taught me a lot about management skills.

Next is the garden, but we’ll take that one easy 😉