Tag Archives: built in

Einbauschränke – Wardrobes

Since July we have been living with two clothes racks and the rest of our clothes in suitcases and boxes. It is starting to drive me a *little* bit nuts. We’ve driven to Germany twice now to investigate about building some built-in wardrobes (otherwise referred to as Einbauschränke in our household) in our bedroom.

The whole idea of a built-in wardrobe is actually more in line with an American closet system. Typical Swiss bedrooms are rectangles with no closets, which dismays many Americans, including my mother. Swiss usually have a tall wardrobe for hanging things and sometimes a dresser for storing other items.

Wardrobes are by far more popular than dressers and just like you move your light fixtures with you from apartment to apartment, the wardrobe usually comes too… unless you are lucky enough to sell it so that you do not have to move them!

We thought that the idea of building a built-in wardrobe would be better because we can avoid using anything for the back of the wardrobe, thus avoiding mold problems in our fresh new build. It would also be a more permanent solution that hopefully adds to the value of our home.

After visiting a few different places, I’m almost sure we will work with Möbeldick after seeing all the Noteborn wardrobes in their store.

Noteborn has tons of options for built-in and standalone wardrobes, with finishes in wood, glass, with frame or frameless doors and all kinds of inside options.

It was a little overwhelming trying to figure out what we want inside the wardrobe.

After living with our other wardrobes for four years, I was sure that I wanted more drawers! The problem is that they are pretty darn expensive! Each drawer is about €250 or $337 a piece. Ouch!

But I do not want to live without some drawers and this is pretty much the cheapest we can get for built-in wardrobes, so we are a little stuck.

How much money would you put into your clothes storage system? Do you have fancy American closets I can be jealous of? Tell all in the comments. 🙂

(All images via Noteborn.)

Neubau Progress: I

I should have shared all these pictures a while ago, but I’ve taken my sweet time doing it. I mean, I was busy writing weddingbee recaps when I took these last March!

We cheated a little during our first inspection and just went to some other flats in the same row that already had the wooden beams taken down so that we could get an idea of the true height of the ceiling.

I was standing next to the kitchen entrance on the left, the hallway to the door was to the right and closer in the foreground to the right is the hallway to the bathroom/bedroom. If you notice, this particular flat doesn’t have the built in wardrobes behind that big concrete pillar on the right. The plan would look like this without the built in wardrobe:

Was that big block with all the wiring really necessary to put there in the middle instead of by one of the side walls or up inside the réduit? If that could be somewhere else, there would have been a lot more layout possibilities with the flat. I mean, yeah it’s sort of a handy donut hole for wiring (there are other holes in the kitchen and the bathrooms) but I feel like they could have planned it a little better. The thing about hallways here is that you really pay a premium for that extra floorspace, but you can’t utilize the space for tables or sofas. It’s more “walking area” than “living area”.

Taking away the built in wardrobes does open up the space a lot, but to store coats, shoes and other things you would have to buy or build some storage next to the door. We never had a coat closet in either of the flats we’ve lived in together and I’ve never had one in the flat I lived in alone, so we are both looking forward to having a place to store all our winter and summer coats. Between the two of us we really have a lot of ski jackets, trekking jackets, etc, and now they are all piled up on a poor coat stand by the door and half are shoved under the attic roof in the laundry area.

Second bedroom. Those floor to ceiling windows will be nice!

Looking out our bedroom windows.

Standing in the master bath where the tub will eventually be. I’m obviously really excited about showering here someday. Kay thought the master bath is small, but I think it looks huge, don’t you?

Another view from the living room into the kitchen.

When we viewed the flat without the wooden beams up, Kay still thought it looked overall small, but I was happy with the size. I seem to have better spacial skills (whereas he wins with directional skills) and I was happy with how large it is. The bedrooms are not enormous, but the living room is huge for us and the kitchen will be a big upgrade.

Theoretically we could  have a baby here if forced to and it should be large enough that we can set up some kind of guest room. This makes it OK in my book!

Want to catch up?