2 Old house
It stood in a narrow, cobbled street just inside the city walls and had not been lived in since around the time Germany became one country again in 1989. Neighbours told me that it had been flooded by a burst water-pipe not long ago.
That might explain why the rear of the building had partially caved in. Behind it was a tiny dark and very damp yard alongside a high wall belonging to the next plot. A pig used to be kept there once, poor ceature. I have heard that quite a few families kept pigs and other small livestock in their backyards. In Muehlhausen you are often reminded of the agricultural side of life. In the Middle Ages it was common for prosperous citizens to have their wealth based on land just beyond the city walls.
The elder bushes in the photo hide the collapsed timbers. They flourished, of course, in such damp conditions. My son's house right next door dates from the mid-seventeenth century. It is a fine, strong baroque structure with thick carved beams. Compared with it the little house next door looked fairly insignificant and we would not have been surprised to find it had fallen down one day.
The thought of buying and restoring it came only very slowly after I had looked at a great many other houses. And there were plenty on the market in 2004 (and there still are), especially in the old city centre. During the East German Communist days no-one had been encouraged to preserve the old buildings. In some ways you could see that as a blessing. Muehlhausen hasn't been renovated to death or turned into the average pretty tourist attraction with no individuality. In addition to the really old buildings there were numerous early 20th-century houses for sale, solidly built and with good cellars and attics. I was very tempted by two or three. Anyone in their senses would have bought one, but the little house in that lovely old street began to be a bit of an obsession.
One of my son's friends was the estate agent who had handled the purchase of his (my son's) house and it was he who spent a great many hours and a lot of petrol showing me all the nice sensible properties with great investment potential that any intelligent person would have preferred to the ramshackle little old house. But the little house won and he, bless him, negotiated the sort of price that goes with buildings about to collapse. Not only that, but he put me in touch with a firm of civil and structural engineers who took on with great enthusiasm a task quite unlike the other large and solid projects they usually deal with, a project with enormous potential for horrendous complications, some of which they undoubtedly foresaw and many others that kept on turning up just we thought we'd settled everything.
The estate agent, who with his family is now one of my kindest friends, runs König Immobilien Mühlhausen in the Ratsstrasse in Mühlhausen. The firm of civil engineers is the Ingenieurbüro Kellner Lindenbühl street, just beyond the walls in their late nineteenth-century villa, restored beautifully by the firm itself.
Both Harald Kellner himself and Dietmar Frohn, the structural engineer who handled architectural engineering for the firm, survived all my totally uninformed questions and suggestions and several times saved me from making silly mistakes and misjudgments. Dietmar Frohn kept a close eye on every detail, spent many hours with me checking the various estimates and making sure I benefitted from any available reductions, such as the discount of 3% for prompt payment of bills. Dietmar Frohn now has his own structural engineering firm in Mühlhausen Ingenieurbüro für Bauwesen (Structural Engineering) Dipl-Ing.(FH) Dietmar Frohn and can be contacted by email at DIETMARFROHN@GMX.DE.
