Weeknote 17
Not so much weeknotes, more fortnightnotes. Which doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as easily.
The bootcamp in all things property transaction-related continued, and I now know more than I ever realised I would know about Wiemar Republic construction techniques. What was striking is how well these stand up to the cardboard-and-gaffer-tape approaches that are standard in the UK, and are my default mental models.
I also ended up down a heating system rabbit hole. Oil-fired systems aren’t exactly outlawed these days, but there are very strong financial incentives to replace them with alternatives that kick out less CO2 and particulates. German bureacracy being what it is, figuring out –exactly– what you need to do isn’t especially straight-forward - but the bottom line is that there’s potentially 55% of the cost which can be recovered with the right combination of systems.
Legal and financial paperwork, on the other hand, isn’t AT ALL straight-forward, especially when it’s entirely paper-based. Solving that problem involved a ridiculous workflow of scanning into PDF then copy/pasting text into a translator. Legalistic German is way beyond my capabilities, even if the contracts are completely boilerplate and regulated to the moon in the first place.