Flat Fiasco

It's amazing how life can lurch from positive to negative and back again so quickly. The weekend was quite good, relaxing although busy, and we awoke this morning with a sense of refreshed optimism. With Wolfie's driving license sorted, along with our new flat in Spandau, things were looking up, at least until I was awoken to news that the prospective new landlord had started to query where the signed documentation was. I walked into the living room seeing Wolfie dealing with it, having already signed all of the documents and needing my John Hancock. However, I hadn't actually read the contract. We decided to have one last readthrough, where we noticed that the minimum lease period was two years. This presents a problem as neither of us are willing to commit this long. We had been clear with the estate agent from the beginning that a year was our maximum term right now, not least because neither of us have passed our probation periods while we still don't have the residence cards either. To read the two year requirement was particularly galling as Wolfie had spent much of the last six weeks working on securing this flat and we had put all our eggs in this basket. The market here is competitive enough and with a block of 25 being renovated, this represented our best chance of securing something long-term.

We are fortunate that the landlord here, although this is only a temporoary place, has let us extend on a rolling month-by-month basis but of course there's no real permanence to this arrangement. We don't know how long this is going to last, but we are going to ask tomorrow. We're also going to ask whether they have any short-term one-year leases available elsewhere, plus we are going to have to go back to the estate agent and state the reasons why we are turning the Spandau house down. It's taken much soul searching, frank discussion and chats with my parents but it seems our only course of action. We are gutted as it looked like the perfect flat for us, we already had a move-in date and we had started to dream of a little more permanence in our lives. However, with COVID still raging, probation uncompleted and neither of us being particularly happy with our jobs, we feel we cannot take on a two-year lease right now. Furthermore, being tied to two years when you don't know the neighbours is a risk I don't want to take.

This is frustrating, as I am hearing contradictory information about whether a two-year lease is the norm or not. Indeed, back in February we turned down another good property due to the two-year requirement, and some people tell me that two years is standard due to tenancy law. However, others tell us that they got their properties for a one-year minimum period so we don't know what to believe. One year we can deal with as even if we go back to the UK, we have enough money to pay the existing commitment (leaving the flat empty worst case), but we cannot risk that with two years. This means, frustratingly, we are back to square one on the flat move and perhaps worse than that, needing to wait until Wolfie and I are more comfortable both here and with our jobs before picking up the flat search again. This may necessitate a number of short-term moves, which will be expensive and a hassle, but probably preferable due to the flexibility entailed. I just hope that the landlord here lets us stay on as this place, albeit a little too small, is working well for us right now. However, we would like to be settled as everything is so hard right now.

Related to this, Gothi contacted me this morning asking whether I was okay as she had had a bad dream about us suffering in Germany. It turned out to be quite prescient in the end.