Apartment: FINALLY!

Hooray! We got the apartment! Move in date is July 1, 10 days before Stefan finishes the school year, so it'll be tricky for him. We're hoping to move out of our old place on July 11th so that the first part of July can be used to set up the new space and allow Stefan to keep his office stress (and end-of-year grading) to a minimum. Pray that we find flexible 'nachmieter'. Nachmieter are new tennents who move in before your time is up - we have to give 3 months notice but will only be giving 2, thereby risking have to pay a month's rent at the new place and a month's rent here at the old place. Tricky! Below is a picture of the new place, unfortunately not a clear shot. We're up under the roof where the skylights are, but it's actually a huge space, twice our current square footage! And it's bright too. It's about 20 years younger than our current building, so this is a step up, ha ha!
Stefan will still be able to bike to school from the new place and we'll still be very close to grocery shopping, so this is great. I think we'll be far enough out of the valley to not have to hear the trains and autobahn, so this is good. The garage rental worked out perfectly and we'll have a garage and bit of driveway on our move-in date.

We need to have a kitchen ready when we move in, so pray we can figure out those details as well. Here you can see how empty it is. Here's a thread discussing the phenomenon of why Germans take their kitchens with them when they move: click here. I have been up to my eyeballs in kitchen design stuff. It's a little crazy. The good news is that since the new apt doesn't require a security deposit we can use our current security desposit to pay for the bulk of the new kitchen price. Today we were able to snag 2 deals with Ikea that ensure 0% interest on the rest of the kitchen fees and get several hundred euros of credit towards interior fittings, which is awesome! Perfect timing!

Below is a very rough and not to scale version of what we're thinking of doing. The slanted ceiling takes away a chunk of useable workspace for me, so adding the other counter/island is key. The little doorway into the pantry actually stops at my eyebrows, so that gives you a feel for how it's a teeny bit cramped back in that corner!

Feel free to comment - we're open to ideas. Neither one of us has planned a kitchen before!