I live in one currently. One of the early ones from the late 60s.

Location is great, city provides hot tap water and heating. Cheap utilities.

Huge amounts of these were insulated all over the country starting from the late 90s. EU also provided funds for that after my country got in.

I honestly don’t remember seeing typical commie block not maintained well from the outside in cities nowadays.

On the negative side - walls are crooked and not soundproof, this is usual, flat sizes are a bit too small for families. 50m^2 is most common for ones built before 80s I think.

I did talk lately with retired construction engineer that knows these, he said that although these were built cheaply and were supposed to be temporary - as long as steel reinforcements don’t rust, probably will outlast all of us.

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This stuff absolutely doesn’t need to be expensive. I was doing electronics for a long time now. I guess I am at professional level but I never got regular 9-5 job doing electronics, I was always doing odd jobs like repair, design, construction.

I only recently got modern tools for this. For years my books, parts, tools and methods were mostly from 70s/80s that I got from various public dumps. That was 10 years ago though, now these places are closed.

If you need to do something really fast and cheap - draw a pcb with sharpie and use ferric chloride to etch it. Modern oscilloscope is a luxury. Since I was working mainly with audio stuff I had a diy amplifier with a speaker connected to it that I used to listen to waveforms.

A lot of tools can made by hand too. There is a ton of old projects for old atmega microcontrollers. One of the best projects like this was sold as generic chinese made “multipurpose tester” which - last time I checked - was not properly designed when looking at the original. Original would this one - https://www.mikrocontroller.net/articles/AVR_Transistortester But everything necessary for this project is here - https://github.com/svn2github/transistortester/tree/master