5 NORMAL THINGS YOU WON'T FIND IN A GERMAN HOME 🇩🇪

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[SusiBlumentopf]

There had been a time 1970-1980ies, were full carpets were laid, but as you mentioned, were hard to clean. You have pets, kids, guests and the carpet get very dirty. So people got back to the use of only small carpets on the floor.

Using tiles make it easy to fix just damaged spots on the roof, and tiles do not rost. Before, wooden shingles were used.

[Attirbful]

guess what, built-in closets take up space as well…. AND they limit how you can place your other furniture in it. I have seen many American apartments and houses in which the beds block the windows because they cannot be placed across from the window because that is where the closet is and you must be able to open it and can‘t place anything in front of it… I think it makes more sense to buy wardrobes and plan rooms according to your needs (a bedroom can easily become an office, a craft room, a playroom etc.)…

[felimuller]

Larger homes sometimes have a "Hauswirtschaftsraum" for the washing machine, and for ironing. Apartment buildings often have a communal "Waschküche" in the cellar either with communal or private washing machines. It really depends on the house/apartment!

[juwen]

Door handles also are much more practical if you had no free hand, cause you can still use it with the elbow 🤓😉

[EvaCornelia]

As for carpets/wooden floors: I grew up in the 70s and 80s in rented flats which had carpets everywhere. You couldn't choose the color as they came with the apartment. The house of my grandparents was built in the 1930s and had all wooden floors, which were replaced with carpets in the 1970s. Around 2000 most carpets in Germany were replaced with wooden floors or laminate again. I was truly shocked when I landed in Canada for the first time and found that the whole floors of the airport had a carpet. I really didn't understand, because it's much harder to pull your suitcase across a carpet. As for the laundry rooms - I never saw a house or apartment with a laundry room in my whole life, so I never ever missed it :)

[biankakoettlitz]

In Norway my washingmashine does the handwashing, I have a program for it.

[CaroAbebe]

Despite its very compact layout, our Austrian home has a small laundry room. I love it, it’s so practical!

[heidiann]

In the seventies it was very fashionable to have a carpet floor all over the house. But because it is so difficult to keep the carpet clean and because it is difficult if you have a dust allergy, people went back to hard wood or tile floors or something similar.

[marrykurie]

Me as a native german, I think it's rather inconveniant when you move to a new place and can't plan out the room like you want to because one wall is a closet. Doesn't this hinder your way of desining a room to your wishes?

[andreaseufinger]

There are door knobs in Germany. It's just kind of rare and old fashioned. There was one in my grandpa's at the end of the 19th century.
Carpets were a thing in the 70s in Germany. But it just less hygienic and it turned out that people have more allergies with fixed carpets.

[AlBfR]

Built in storage still uses space even if it‘s integrated into the wall. But that particular wall is lost for everything else. With a closet you are more flexible. You can use every wall you like and even left or right of the closet there is still space which can be used. And Germans love flexibility. That‘s why they wear Jack Wolfskin jackets. 🙂

[twinmama]

It's easy to incorporate a closet into a wooden construction. The space between the timber is air and cover sheeting and would be wasted otherwise. In German homes, you have brick-and-mortar walls. They are massive. Constructing a closet needs more bricks (and is therefore heavier i.e. not desirable). The house where I grew up had central wood heating with little tiled stoves distributing the heat and a chimney. Between the chimney and the normal walls was enough space to build small closets, but my father made them himself after we moved in. He stored his Super-8-film equipment there and I had a small space to store my school stuff.
Terracotta or concrete roof tiles are of higher quality and more durable than tin roofs. But they are heavier, and too heavy for some timber frame constructions. As we Germans love our quiet, we'd go crazy with tin roofs. If we need lightweight roofs, we prefer shingles.

[xcoder]

As for storage: If you have built in storage, you are losing the same amount of space, if not more, as what happens here is that a wall is put int front of another wall, so the room is made smaller to begin with and sometimes the rooms are planned suboptimal to make sure you have corners where you can realize that built-in space. And as it is fixed, you must accept it as it is. I can decide how many cabinets I want to put up, how big they are, where I want to put them and I can change my mind every two month if I want to. With built-in storage, it is as it is, unless you want to tear out walls and re-rebuild your entire interior.

[ThomasVWorm]

Built-in closet take up space too. The wall you see in Germany is the same wall, which is in the closet. Without a built-in closet you do have much more freedom about how you do want to use your home.

We do use the sleeping room as our living room. With a built-in closet the room would be much smaller.

[jackybraun]

Coming from the UK, I find bare wooden or tiled floors cold and uninviting, regardless of how warm the room is. I was used to wall-to-wall carpets, of course.

I find I am continually cleaning my tiled and laminate floors here in Germany. Then I think - what if all that dirt was hidden in the pile of a carpet? So it's cosiness versus cleanliness.

[claudiab.]

I think the main reason why we don't have built in storage (or even kitchens) is because people like to choose for themselves how the cosets should look like, where they want them, the way they match with the sofas, curtains etc.
As to the tin-roofs: I don't exactly know, but I would think it's a matter of isolation. Since tin seems to lead heat/cold the isolation to keep the house warm/cool could be very harder to accomplish?

[florianj]

In every detached house with a cellar/basement you have a laundry room called "Waschküche". It's very common and just not the case in an apartment.
Some people have the washing machine in the kitchen or bathroom, but all my family and friends who also own a house have a "Waschküche".

[rolfgarske]

I find builtin closets rather inconvenient. They take space away anyway, so they are in no way superior to a piece of furniture. And they are probably not in the place where you would like them and you can’t change it. So they can prevent you from putting furniture where you want it to be. They limit your choices.

[nicolerothmann]

We do have door knobs in our house. It's because of our cats: They are able to open doors using handles but not via knobs. And we don't want them to enter everywhere at any time.

[annarend]

Doorknobs exist in Germany, but handles are more common nowadays. Glued in carpet exists, but as you mentioned is harder to clean, therefore harder floors are often preferred.
What I really didn't see in Germany, is bathrooms with carpet all over, that's something I know from England