When I was house-shopping, some of the houses I looked at came with a washer & dryer and some didn’t. The one I ended up buying did.
Doing a quick bit of browsing on realtor.com, I see that listings for houses typically include a list of appliances that they come with. Some include washer & dryer, some don’t.
One issue is that some dryers are electric and some run on gas. I suspect that people who move to a new house are especially likely to leave their appliances behind if they don’t match the hookup in the place they’re moving to.
Right, exactly what I experienced as well.
And the hygiene stipulations in Germany at least state that you have to have two doors that can be closed between the place you cook and the place where what you have digested is dumped. That is usually the door between the corridor and the kitchen and the door between the corridor and the toilet.
And corridors are quite practical, imagine having many rooms in which different people live: you don’t want to have rooms you have to cross in case you want to go to the other side of the house. They are good places to stock your books, for instance, or hang nice pictures so they don’t fade bc. of the sunlight.
That may be one reason why IKEA is such a big deal in Europe. Make it $1,000 and a couple of hours. I have been told many Americans do not even know what IKEA is.
It depends on the laws of the country. In Belgium for instance, leases are usually by law for 9 years and renewable, but you (not the landlord!) can move out at no cost after threee years, if you move after two years, you pay one month’s worth rent additionaly as a penalty, if you move after one year, two month’s rent, and if you move during the first 12 months, three rents.
Even if someone is ok hanging the cabinets on the wall (which isn’t trivial, most use a pro), to remove the cabinets under the counter top increases the complexity. If the countertop is granite then you need to replace that (due to high chance of cracking). If it’s something like quartz you could do it, but again not trivial.
I think most people in the US know IKEA, we have their stores here also.
Here’s someone that used IKEA, they spent $8,000 on the cabinets, $4,000 on the counter tops, plus installation costs.
Here’s one for $4,000 and 8 hours just to assemble IKEA cabinets.
I think we’re probably talking about apples and oranges regarding what is being installed.
Just chiming in to say that, as an American, I don’t think I’ve ever even visited an American house that didn’t have built-to-fit cabinets that would take a crowbar and a few hours of heavy labor to remove, much less replace. And as part of that you’d have to tear down the counter, since the undercounter cabinets support it, and also remove the sink, since it’s attached to the counter… The over-the-counter cabinets would be easier to remove, but they are usually shaped to provide extra space over the sink and stove, and of course the fridge, not to mention gaps for windows, etc., so the replacements would still have to be custom-fitted.
Actually, I’m having difficulty imagining how the just-screw-it-to-the-wall cabinets you describe would even work; do you have a link to some pictures somewhere?
German here. I did it once, in one day, with the help of about six or seven friends, that is moving a one man household including the whole kitchen with appliances. I had bought the kitchen four years before, originally custom made for my former apartment. It was not trivial to rearrange the different parts, the places of the sink and the electrical devices (stove and dish washer) had to be rearranged according to the supply lines in the new apartment, and that meant that the whole countertop had to be replaced and reworked to fit the new arrangement. But you can buy a variety of kitchen countertops by the meter in every home improvement center, at least here, and if you got one ore two good home workers in your team with the right tools, that’s not much of a problem.
A lot of American homes built from the 20s to the 40s had the front door open into a big hall with a closet on one end. The hall would be wide enough for hatracks and a bench.
They also often had two living rooms, many times on either side of the hall. In many cases what I believe was the formal room had no direct access to the rest of the house, except in those designs where the formal room and living room could be joined via opening a large pocket door.
I find the entry hall a great feature. Take off your boots , hang up your coat. It’s nice to be sitting on the couch and not have a freezing wind blow on you when ever someone comes in. It also kind of serves as an airlock so that freezing draft doesn’t come blowing through your open floor plan.
Also nice if you are the person coming in. Especially to someone else’s home. Not to have to stand or kneel awkwardly undressing in the living room on a 3’x3’ tiled space in front of the door.
Let’s see. The townhouse I rented for years had hookups in the basement for a washer and dryer, but you had to provide your own. So we did (a GE set for something like $800), and they eventually got moved into a purchased house years later. Which was lucky, as the house was built in the early 50s and had the hookups in the kitchen, and the little ones that were purchased for the apartment actually fit well in the kitchen. Most sold these days are too big for the available space. The same townhouse also required installing our own curtain rods, as the windows came with no treatments.
I’ve insisted on only moving into apartments with included in-unit washer/dryer since college. By the time I was 25 I was tired of dealing with laundromats. You’ll generally pay more, and it may be those little ones instead of separate larger units, but it’s a common option.
I have left improvements in apartments over the years. Generally not too much or too expensive–fancy and expensive ($20 each at the time) dimmable LED lights in a ceiling fixture, a badly-needed towel bar, extension chains for a ceiling fan, those sorts of things. With the popularity of wall-mounting TVs, most apartments I’ve seen are fine with fairly large holes in the walls as long as they’re still under a specific size.
The problem with IKEA in the US is that plenty of people know of it, but cannot easily shop at one. There’s a million people in the Albuquerque metro area (easily the largest city in the state by a factor of 10) and it’s centrally located in the state. The closest IKEA stores are in Denver, roughly 425 miles away, or Phoenix, which is about the same distance. I’d pick Denver in a heartbeat. The closest one to El Paso is, I think, about 600 miles if you stay in Texas and 425 miles if you are willing to deal with Phoenix. Albany, NY, which has a surprising amount of near-flagship stores, is a drive all the way to the NYC area and you’re probably better off in New Jersey than Brooklyn or Long Island. Sure, you can always get things shipped, but it’s really quite expensive and slow. They really don’t have very many stores in the US, and they’re highly concentrated in large metro areas.
Then, yes, bed are considerably lower over here. In fact, many are plainly at floor level. There’s a bed as high as what you describe in my late grandmother’s house. But I would suspect it’s more than 80 years old and it might very well be the only one that high I slept in in my life (I wouldn’t swear it, though).
Yes, I envisioned that. That people might tend to stay longer in one place over here, hence have a strongest tendency to consider a place as their own. I know a number of people who rent and haven’t moved in decades. In fact my parents rented the same place for I think almost 30 years, leaving it only when they retired (and they changed the kitchen cabinets twice, when I think of it). Now I really don’t know how different it is from this point of view, though. There are certainly statistics about this out there.
The tenant needs only to warn three months in advance (and even less in some circumstances). The 3 years duration of the lease essentially prevents the landlord from evicting the tenant during this duration.
And most people don’t rent because they want to be flexible but because they can’t afford to buy. For most tenants, the place their rent is their long term residence, and they have no particular intent to move. Once again, I don’t know how the %age of tenants vs owners compare between France and the USA, but I assume that a larger %age of Americans own their place. Although I’m not convinced it would be much in different for large cities, because I doubt many people can afford to buy an apartment in New York, for instance.
No, it’s legal, but only for apartments provided with furniture (“meublés”) that have always followed different rules, are a small part of the rentals and most often rented to people who work temporarily in one place (which is probably your case).
Sure, if you have many rooms, it definitely makes sense. The problem is that I’ve seen and even stayed in many older (as I said build up to the 1970, maybe) small, two rooms (one living room, one bedroom) apartments that still had a long corridor taking up at least 10% of the surface. Even a less than 20 square meters studio with a corridor. And we’re talking about Paris or Paris area where the square meter isn’t precisely cheap.
It’s definitely the norm here for all major appliances and anything that is physically attached to be part of the property sale unless it’s specifically excluded. In fact when my mom was selling the condo where I grew up, she had a beautiful stained glass lamp hanging from the dining room ceiling that my grandfather, an antique dealer, had carefully repaired himself. She almost bit off the real estate agent’s head when he assumed that was part of the sale.
Same when we sold our condo - we had a stained-glass lamp that we had bought in Istanbul hanging from the dining room ceiling. Luckily we had kept the boring, off-the-shelf ceiling lamp that was there when we bought the place, so we could just reinstall it before the photos for the listing were taken and avoid any misunderstandings.
And before that, when we bought the condo, the previous owners had installed a surround sound system in the living room, with speakers mounted on the wall. They specifically excluded those from the sale when writing up the contract (and then forgot later that they had done so, which meant that they removed them right before the closing. I didn’t care about the speakers, but it would have been nice if they’d patched the paint!)
As for the fridge we bought and left in the condo (the previous one died and was too expensive to repair): yes, it was freestanding, but it had an ice maker, which required a much handier person than either of us is to hook up the water line. I do miss that fridge and the washer/dryer set that we bought for the condo; they are much nicer than the ones we got with the house that we bought a year and a half ago!
And in Spain, a lot of things such as “having decent kitchen cabinets” which are the owner’s duty can be done by the renter by mutual agreement: better to have everything in writing, though. The only time I had a landlord who didn’t fix things ASAP or, if they couldn’t, ask me if I would be able to do it and indicate that they’d accept “temporary reduction in payment” as a way for me to transfer them the cost, was also the one landlord who expected to get the kitchen furnished for free. I come from a family of accountants and lawyers…
