Zu Hause, süßer zu Hause (Home, sweet home) - from the outside

German houses have taken some getting used to. Keep in mind I grew up in New England, where the houses which aren't 200 year old clapboard sided gems are all trying to look like they are. Now come to Germany, where the first thing that strikes you about the homes is that all are brick, stone, slate, or stucco-faced. Not a bit of shingling to be found, unless you count the slate shingles on the old houses. Then you notice that all the windows are single panes of glass, not usually broken up into real or faux small panes (as they are at least in the northeast U.S.). If it is nighttime or many people are on vacation, you'll see metal-looking or wooden blinds completely enclosing the exterior of the windows and rendering the house snug as a turtle.

Entering the house, you might notice how thick the wall is around the door. Just how thick are these walls? In the spirit of inquiry I have just measured the wall at the kitchen window to be approx. 15 1/4 inches. Having watched several houses go up in our neighborhood I can tell you why - the house is assembled, lego-like, from large cement bricks (roughly 4 feet high). Then insulation, which is made of either large felt-like or styrofoam-like bricks, around 6-inches thick, is attached to the exterior of the house. Then the final facing (brick or brick-face or stucco) is put on. Older houses might be a bit different in components, but the idea would be the same. I'm told that German houses actually have efficiency standards - the walls much achieve a certain R value (if I remember my thermo correctly) to show that they are not allowing heat to escape. But as a consequence of the building materials, it's easy to spot where new houses are going up in the area, by spotting the cranes poised over them to lift the stones!

Houses are smaller here, but also more compact - our house, although approximately 1800 sq. feet, has a footprint of about (my estimate) 550-600 sq. feet. Our old American house would feel sprawling in comparison, although it wasn't really that much bigger, living area-wise. The lot on which the house sits is about 550 sq. meters, or around 5900 sq. feet (about 1/8 acre). The first thing visitors say when they come to visit - 'What a big garden you have!'. This is because, since we're the last house in our row, we have a double-wide lot. Most people's yards around here are exactly as wide as their building - meaning maybe 20 feet wide!

Germans must believe that 'good fences make good neighbors', because the first thing that goes into any new construction is something to delineate the yard, either living (hedge) or not (fence, dead hedge). This is a great thing, really, because a) Germans like to sunbathe b) Germans aren't that far behind America in the obesity race and c) many Germans like very, very brief bathing suits*.


* S. has been Americanized enough to wear a modest pair of trunks.