Dutch houses

We woke up Monday morning to a waterfall in our kitchen.  It had been lightly raining all night and it turns out our gutter was clogged.  You see, our kitchen is part of an add-on in the back of the house with a flat roof that serves as our terrace.  And the gutter downspout for said roof runs... inside of the house.  I assume the water goes into the sewer system after it has travelled through the pipe in our kitchen, but with the pipe clogged it was just raining indoors.

This is one of many things we've had to learn how to navigate in Dutch houses, which are unexpectedly far more different than what I imagined.  I thought I'd share some interesting tidbits that we've learned so far, including differences in the house purchasing process.  We will, of course, be continuing to learn all sorts of exciting things for a long time to come, so please note that this is a tiny list and feel free to ask me questions to research if you're curious!

Brick and sand

I've never lived in a brick house before.  Maybe you have, but you're also probably reading this from the PNW where you had brick over soil.  More often, though, your house was a concrete foundation in the soil with wood on top.  When water got in the walls, you worried about rot and structural damage.

Here, the ground is entirely sand.  When crews are on the street doing utility work, they pull up the bricks, move them to the side, and dig through the sand to find the pipes or whatever else they're working on.  Then, they put the mound of sand back in the hole, flatten it out, and put the bricks back on top.

Furthermore, the groundwater is so high here that if your house is old enough (hi, ours is old) then it may not be protected enough from water seeping up through the bricks.  And when the bricks get wet, the plaster on top of them gets wet and the paint bubbles and all that fun stuff... but, as our realtor reminded us while we were touring this house, "bricks don't rot".  So, even though our kitchen was raining, it's just a matter of tearing off the top layer and putting a new one on.  At least there's that.

Gutters

Until this incident, I hadn't paid close attention to the gutter systems along the row houses.  With the houses all attached, side by side, and sitting directly on the sidewalk without any sort of open ground, where does the water all go?  Turns out, the corner houses tend to take the responsibility for the block.  So, our downspout appears to be the end of the line for water collected across our house and the houses of our two subsequent neighbors.  Folks around here seem surprised that it's inside of our house still, but that may be because the kitchen itself was added onto the house at a later time and the pipes may have previously been on the outside, like everyone else's.

But they're still quite different than gutter systems in the US because even if they are tacked onto the outside of the house, they mostly still run directly to the sewer system underground.  There aren't any overflowing gutters that splash out into the sidewalks and streets here.  Every few houses, there's just a pipe leading from the roof straight through the sidewalk.  It makes sense.

Windows, air flow, and temperature

When we bought our house, it was January and it was cold.  The price of heating, however, was also still super high so we didn't want to waste energy on an empty house.  We turned our heating system way down... and that was apparently too low of a temperature for the gas boiler to maintain, so our heating system promptly died and we had to replace the boiler before we moved in.  Yey.  I really have zero concept of how all of that works, but what I can say is that our neighbor's landlord told them that they couldn't turn their heater down below 15C at any point.  I've never had a gas run system before, so maybe it will all make sense to anyone other than myself.

I know that this is not unique to NL, but all of the radiators are placed underneath the windows.  The windows that you're supposed to keep open for air flow quite often, and maybe that's the difference because the heat from your radiator flows right out that window when you're trying to stay warm.  It's totally normal to have your window open, a radiator turned on underneath its wooden sill, and a curtain hanging down all around it.  I feel like in the US the radiators were mostly electrical, which probably increases the fire risk and may explain why the curtains and wooden sill aren't a problem here.

The part that I don't understand is the relationship between the brick, the water, and the heat which requires the windows to be open quite frequently, even in the winter.  When we arrived to NL on December 1st last year, our AirBnB host had the heaters set to 17C and had all of the windows in the unit open to air it out.  They also instructed us to make sure we continued to air the space out, which makes sense from a more general air flow perspective but the unit was already so poorly insulated that we were super cold indoors even with the windows closed.  I will say, the wind makes a quick job of it at least - an open window for just a few minutes while it's windy has an enormous effect.

You're all probably familiar with the very tall and narrow Dutch houses with huge windows and a hook on their roof so that you can use a pully system to get furniture through the windows on the upper floors.  The hook system doesn't appear to exist much in Leiden, but the large windows are definitely still used to move in furniture, even on upper stories.  The IKEA and other boxed-furniture type of style has helped people be able to move things up the tiny, winding stairs more easily, but I've seen moving companies with cranes and scaffolding often enough.  

Okay, and one last tidbit about windows.  Screens don't seem to be a thing here for whatever reason, so the bugs help themselves quite freely into the house.  Particularly, the mosquitos.  We expected insects to be more prevalent here, but we expected them to be a bigger problem outside rather than inside.  Instead, we've bought mosquito nets for our beds yet can't seem to find any that exist properly outside of the house.

Buying a house

We first decided to move to NL in early 2021, so we had almost 2 years to save money and figure out the logistics.  After some research, we decided to buy a house with cash because we wouldn't have qualified for a Dutch mortgage and the rental market was overwhelming to understand.  (I'm aware that I reek of privilege here, please know that I realize of how much it took to get us here).  So, our home buying process likely looked a bit differently than it would for most people.

Just like in the States, we start with a realtor ("makelaar").  Unlike in the States, his fee to help us buy a house was a flat 3,750 rather than a percentage of the cost, so he wasn't incentivized to push us out of our budget.  Not that I've ever personally encountered a realtor in the US who did so, it's just a systemic thing to point out.  Anyway, he was delightful and helped us in all the ways a realtor in the States would - talked about pros and cons of function and different construction types, considerations for the neighborhood, and - perhaps most importantly - the details of our Dutch language contracts.

One striking difference that I appreciated between the NL and US process is that we had more direct contact with the current home owners alongside their realtors from the beginning.  They ran their own open house to prospective buyers, in fact.  We found that in the US, the buyer and seller were aware of each other's names from the paperwork but didn't communicate directly at any point.  Here, the realtors continued to act as our agents and did all of the work once our offer was on the table and the ball was rolling, but it didn't feel taboo to know the current owners.  In fact, we signed the paperwork in-person together in front of the notary and then exchanged phone numbers afterwards in case we had any questions about the house and because they only moved 50m down the street - folks seem almost fatedly disinclined to leave our neighborhood, but I'll talk about that in more detail another time.