Oh no! Please no. Please, do not make me move apartments again. Please. Anything but that!
Hey everyone! I’m Dana and you’re watching Wanted Adventure Living Abroad.
Moving from one apartment to another is never really fun, but looking at how moving is different
in Germany and the U.S. is lots of fun!
First of all, you’ve got to find a new apartment, and as I mentioned in the video on finding
an apartment in Munich, that can be harder in some cities than others, and that goes
for both the U.S. and Germany. But anyway, that’s just the first step.
Next you have to clear out your old apartment, and while IKEA is getting more and more popular
in the U.S., it’s still not as common as here in Germany. Let’s put it like this:
there are about the same number of IKEA stores in the whole U.S. as there are here in Germany.
So yeah, still not so common. So that mean that, whereas here in Germany,
remember all that IKEA furniture that you bought and then had put together piece by
piece with all the flimsy doors and tiny little screws? Well yeah, a lot of that stuff will now
have to be taken apart every flimsy door and tiny little screw at a time in order to get
it through the doors and out of your apartment. Which is a pain in the butt. But it does make
carrying it easier. In the U.S. you’d probably just have one big piece of furniture that
you don’t have to take apart and put back together, but it’s heavy to carry.
And if you bought the cheaper stuff at IKEA, there’s a chance that it might not look
quite right when you take it all apart and then reassemble it again. So, that door might
not hang quite so straight as it once did.
And when you take all your stuff out, you load it into a truck, right? A truck or a
van that you rented for the move. In America, for example, you've got Budget or U-Haul.
And you just go out and rent a truck, no problem. You pick out whichever size truck you need
depending on how big your place is, so how much stuff you have.
Well, here in Germany it doesn’t work quite like that. So, with a normal current driver’s
license -- so not the older driver’s licenses, but with a current basic one -- you can drive
a vehicle that weighs up to three and a half tons, but no more than that.
And that limits the size of the truck that you can rent. Which means that depending on how
big your place is, and how much stuff you actually have, you’ll often have to load
the truck, drive to the new place, unload it all, drive back, reload it, and repeat
as many times as needed. Rather than just renting the truck size that corresponds to
how much stuff you have and then loading it, driving it, and unloading it once.
Here in Germany it’s also been my experience that there’s a pretty good chance you’ll
have to rent both your old apartment and your new apartment for one month together, paying
both rents, and that’s because in addition to all the loading, driving, and unloading
trips you’ll have to make, once the old place is empty, there’s actually a lot you
have to do to the apartment before you can leave, and I’ve found that you’d be hard pressed
to do all those trips and the cleaning in one day or even one weekend.
Of course it varies from apartment to apartment and landlord to landlord, but I have moved
from one apartment to another in the U.S. three times, and I have helped my friends
move to a new apartment in the U.S. many times. And the cleaning up process, I've noticed,
has always been pretty much the same.
For the most part, you don’t have to paint the apartment before you go. You usually just
have to make sure that the walls are still whatever color they were when you moved in.
So, usually white. If you decided to paint one wall blue, let’s say, you’re gonna
have to repaint that wall white. Other things you have to do before you go: vacuum the floors,
maybe steam clean the carpet; basic cleaning. So, make sure that everything looks “nice
and clean" when you leave.
Living here in Germany, it’s been my experience that people are held to a higher
standard when leaving their apartment. So, people here seem to be expected to really,
really clean and paint and erase all traces of themselves from the apartment whatsoever,
so that when they move out, the apartment almost looks as though it had never been lived
in at all.
I mean, not only do you have to repaint the whole apartment when you move out, no matter
how long or short you’ve been living there, but you also have to paint the ceiling!
I don't want to do that!
Okay, so it’s your first night in your new apartment in Germany. You’ve been tirelessly
moving all day, and now it’s starting to get dark, which is when you look around and realize:
Hey, there are no light bulbs in your new apartment. Anywhere. Oh look at that!
Not even in the bathroom.
In fact, there aren’t even any sockets around for your screw a light bulb into if you have
one. So when I moved into my new apartment there are just wires coming out of the ceiling.
That’s it. That’s all I got -- just wires coming out of the ceiling. Not even a place
to screw the light bulb into. I had to buy that and install it myself.
This is a huge difference from where I lived in the U.S., where the apartment pretty much comes
ready to live in. You just have to bring your stuff and your furniture and yourself. I even lived
in one apartment where there was this special kind of light bulb in the closet that lasted
many, many years; way longer than the year and a half that I was planning to live there,
so when the light burned out halfway through my lease, the landlord actually replaced it
because it was considered part of the apartment, rather than part of something that I would be responsible for.
Which brings me to my next difference: closets! Apartments in Germany don’t come with closets
and shelves built in. Most bedrooms are just open rectangles. That’s what your IKEA closet
is for. Also the showers in Germany don’t automatically come with shower curtain rods.
So you often have to go out and buy the shower curtain rod that fits to your shower.
Basically apartments in Germany don’t really come with anything. Um, they don’t come
with blinds for the windows. So you have to measure the windows and then buy those yourself.
As I said before, no light fixtures. If your apartment comes with a little pantry area,
it doesn’t come necessarily with shelves, so you might have to put the shelves in for
your pantry. And the biggie here is that apartments in Germany do not automatically come with
a kitchen! Sometimes there's no kitchen!
Sometimes the person who lived in that apartment before you and is now leaving will offer to
sell you their kitchen. But often they just pack it up and take it with them to their
next place. Which seems problematic to me since all kitchen areas are different sizes
and water lines and stove hook-ups are in different places, but I guess if your kitchen
is modular, you can just go to IKEA and add to it as you need to?
I guess if you have too much kitchen -- so if your kitchen stuff is too big for your
new apartment -- you can just sell part of it. I don’t know. What about the countertop?
Isn't that just one big piece?
But yeah, when we moved into this apartment the kitchen was just a big open empty area.
No fridge, no stove, no oven, no counter, no sink. Nada. Nothing. Nichts.
And that, oh yes, that is a crazy, painful day at IKEA picking out a kitchen.
So crazy and so expensive.
So my question for you is: what do apartments come with where you live and is moving easy,
hard, expensive, cheap? Please let me know in the comments below to be entered to win
this lovely working clock. Mr. German Man and I will go through the comments and pick
a winner from there. Full contest details in the description below.
Thanks so much for watching. Please don’t forget to subscribe and hit that like button,
and also, for more fun stuff, you can check me out over here on my Twitter and my Facebook page.
Until next time, auf Wiedersehen!
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So my question...no, thanks so much for watching.
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