Nachmieter!

We have a nachmieter - somebody who will rent our current apartment before our required 3-month notice is up! Now we don't have to pay rent for July in both places! We will likely pay half a month's rent at the new place for the later half of June so we can get our things over there and be able to clean up the old place.

The bad news is we'll have to paint the current apartment white. The Nachmieter said they liked our colors initially, but then we think the landlord put pressure on them to change their minds. He's using the latest universal rental contract that says tennents have to return the property in the state which they first rent it - ie, if they start with white walls, they leave with white walls. If they started with our blue walls, they could leave with the blue walls and one day our landlord could be stuck with blue walls. Good grief.

With the price of paint in Germany I wouldn't want the old tennents to be in charge of painting the apartment before I moved in. I would automatically assume they would use the cheapest paint possible. Which is what we're doing. We'll do a good job, but we had to repaint this whole place when we moved in - it was so dirty and so on - so by painting it white, we'll already leave it looking better than we recieved it. Oh boy, I just can't wait to be done with this place!