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Neubau Progress: Changing the Electric

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The “rohbau” phase may have been finished, but that did not stop us from requesting and implementing a few electrical changes. We received the electrical layout of the flat and our very own electrician (Kay) got to work:

This plan pretty much looked like garblygook to me, but Kay knew just what all those little red and blue symbols mean. And since he used to be an electrician (score in the husband department!) he had some opinions about what we were dealing with.

Just to help people like me out, I’ve made a little color guide below. Green is for outlets, blue is for switches (which also have outlets in them) and yellow are for overhead light fixtures.

Our current flat actually has tons of outlets, if not too many. We have about six switches in our tiny 1BR flat that do absolutely nothing… or maybe one or two actually control turning off and on one outlet. Anyway, it’s a little ridiculous, but it seems like our flat will have the opposite problem.

Kay spotted out the first possible “problem” with the bedroom. We’ll have to put the bed at one of the side walls, but both walls only have one electrical oulet. (Well, technically the one on the right below is not really on the right wall, but still…) We both charge our phones and use reading lamps, so at first I wanted to put a fixture on both sides of both walls to accommodate having a bed there.

The problem is that we don’t know which side of the room we’ll put our bed on yet so we’d be spending money just for options that we might not use later on. I kind of would like to put it up against the bathroom on the left so that we can have wardrobes on the other side that might block out sounds from neighbors a little more, but I’m undecided because that throws off the “flow” of the room. We asked about adding outlets and found out that it would be 360CHF per outlet plus “taxes and crap” from our contractor. I didn’t really want to spend over $900 just to have outlets everywhere so we decided to leave it as is.

The master bath on the right below has a wall outlet as well as outlets inside the medicine cabinet on the wall so you can discreetly charge things like your toothbrush. You may also notice that little red circle by the toilet that says “CLOS/LR”. Apparently that’s to plug our toilet in, in case we decide we want a bidet toilet. Weeeird.

In the second bedroom on the left above you can see again that they were a little stingy with the outlets in the bedrooms. Only one on two walls in addition to the light switch. Kay kind of wants to put the desks facing each other next to the windows and so he wanted a switch in the middle there, but since each outlet extra cost $400+ we decided not to do anything here either.

On the terrace we’ll have two recessed lights and just one outdoor plug. (I hope that’s enough outlets!) The recessed lights should be nice and they come with the place. All of the other “X”s for light fixtures will just have the wiring setup for us to install our own lights. It may be a little dark when we first move in! Kay doesn’t want to take our current light fixtures with us, but if the next renter doesn’t want to buy them off of us, we may have to.

In the living room we’ll have two light fixtures and a more generous offering of electrical outlets. We did think it was a little strange that they didn’t put any on that right wall though. If you would have a lamp on a buffet for instance, you wouldn’t necessarily want to run an extension cord from the light switch by the door in the lower right. It’s a little strange, but we don’t even own a buffet yet. Maybe we’ll put bookcases or china cabinets there. Who knows!

Not all of the switches have TV/multimedia access. I think we are fairly limited where we can place the TV, but I have big dreams of an L or U shaped couch, so we’ll figure something out.

We also have four recessed lights in the hallway leading to the guest bath. By the light switches we’ll have access to the temperature control and the automatic blinds for the living room.

So what changes did we make?

Highlighted in green below you’ll see the hidden multimedia access outlet that Kay requested. It cost a cool 550CHF ($605) before taxes, but Kay really wanted to have a place in the built in cupboard where he can hide our wireless router, hard drives and possibly a printer, so I gave him that. He didn’t want to have all that junk with wires sitting in the office. Right now it’s kind of hidden in the attic behind our bookcases, but it always disturbs him.

In the kitchen we also made some changes. Below is the original. You can see there is an outlet next to the stove and one next to the sink, but NONE on the other wall, which is exactly where we are planning on storing our coffee pot and hot pot. I know it makes sense to have the outlet next to the stove because you use things like soup mixers there, but come on. What were they thinking when they planned this??

We decided that it would be prudent to put an outlet on both sides of the other counter top. I can survive with an extension cord running under my bed for my nightstand lamp, but I cannot abide with that in the kitchen.

To sum up, we skipped out on extra outlets in the bedrooms and living room, but we splurged for the hidden multimedia outlet and the two (very necessary) kitchen outlets for a grand total of around $2000 when you include all the taxes and fees to “change” the already completed electrical work. We might have liked adding a few extra outlets, but I think we can live with the ones we’ve chosen. And hot damn, electrical work in Switzerland is expensive!

How important was the electrical work in your house? Have you noticed some of the weird decisions people make when installing outlets?

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Neubau Progress: Shower vs. Bathtub

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Although our “rohbau” phase was completed, there was something small that I wanted to change. (I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal.)

Do you recall our floor plan? Check out the master bath. See how it has a bathtub? And the guest bath… it has a shower.

I’ve found this is something very common in Switzerland. Put the bathtub in the “Elternzimmer” aka parent’s bedroom and put the stall shower in the second and third bathrooms. But to me it doesn’t make any sense. If you have babies or little kids in the house, chances are you will probably want to give them a bath… in your master bathroom? Weird.

If you’re anything like Kay or me, chances are that you shower more often than you bathe, so why we would want to have a bathtub in our bathroom over a shower is beyond me. And yes, I know we can shower in a bathtub. I’m getting to the next point.

The reason why we were debating about bathtubs and showers was because there was an option for a “geflieste Dusche” or a flush tiled shower that Kay thought would be so much nicer than the standard shower basin. But it was very expensive at 6000+ CHF and I thought it was wasteful (and stupid) to spend almost half of our renovation budget on the guest bath that we will seldom use. If I was going to have a 6k shower, one that could even be longer than the standard 1m x 1m shower, then I wanted that shower to be in our master bathroom.

Double shower with no sliding door? Hell yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I wouldn’t even have to worry about mold growing as much with just a stationary glass wall to clean. We were both on board with that idea.

Above was what our guest bath looked like and below was what our master bath looked like. Practically the same and we assumed since everything was so far from being done that we could make a little change like this.

“Nope.”

That’s what our general contract manager (I don’t even know how to translate his title…) told us. The floors were already made, so we couldn’t swap the shower and the bathtub.

What?? It didn’t make any sense. Look above! Totally unfinished. Ok, almost totally unfinished. What’s the deal??

We were upset. We wrote registered letters telling our contract that we wanted to switch them and we wanted to know how much it cost. He refused. He told us that the floor was already made and there was a special box deeper cut for the shower installation. In order to have a tiled shower in the master bath we would have to have the floor redone and because the “rohbau” phase was done we were too late. Missed the boat. They were not going to drill up the floor for us. (They only do that themselves when they make big mistakes as we’ve seen…)

We were kind of pissed. I mean, it’s pretty handy that they were finished the rohbau phase as we signed for the apartment because we had a chance to step inside the real flat and see the layout, but switching the bathtub and the shower seemed like it should be so easy at this point and to be told they wouldn’t make this change was pretty frustrating.

In fact, it was around this time that we realized our GM is both stubborn and lazy. When he wasn’t on holiday, he wouldn’t read our emails until we’d call him after a week or two of waiting and all we ever heard from him was, “No.” Not, “Maybe we can work something else out…” Just “No“.

I also was insulted that the GM would ignore my emails and if Kay cc-ed me, the GM would only respond to Kay because “he’s the man” and obviously they are the only ones in a partnership making decisions… Even if Kay was on holiday in Cambodia and I was in Switzerland asking the guy to call me, he would still only direct his responses to Kay. Infuriating!

The GM seemed annoyed that we were taking time out of his coffee break to even address the shower issue and he refused to ever inquire about the cost of redoing a portion of the floor in the master bath, so ultimately after a couple months of fighting we had to give it up. In a complex with 170 flats, there’s no way to “have your way” in situations like this.

Neubau: 1, Katie and Kay: 0.

So when it came down to it, we took the bloody bathtub in the master bath and Kay agreed that we wouldn’t spend the money on a tiled shower, but that we would invest in some non-sliding doors for the shower stall.

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Neubau Progress: II

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After we first visited in March and went through all that crazy contract stuff in April, the long waiting game began. It would be over a year before our flat was done, but it was also the time we started making our “changes” to make the place ours. Kay’s father told us to budget 10-15% of the buying price (yikes!) for all of our additions, but we decided to limit ourselves to a much lower percentage and cap changes to 15k.

When we entered into the contract the “rohbau” (structural foundation) phase was already finished. The electrical and kitchen appliance work was almost done too, which meant if we wanted to make any big changes we had to act fast.

During our visit in June, all the beams were off and they had these structural supports in place in the living room:

Looking out to the left you can see our huge terrace. (Insert happy grin!)

The second bedroom isn’t enormous, so I’m already plotting how to get two desks, bookcases and a guest bed in there.

As it turns out, by the time we got around to asking about it, it seemed like all the kitchen appliance and electrical work was actually finished. That meant that they had already drilled and installed tubing for our electrical tubes for our outlets, oven, refrigerator and pipes for the sink and bathrooms.

This meant that we had to be pretty happy with how the kitchen was laid out, because there would be no affordable way to change it at this point. See those purple tubes? They are for the stove. I’ll just have to be at peace with it in the corner, but that wasn’t really on my list of worries. I was more concerned about what was going on in the bathrooms…

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Neubau Progress: I

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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!

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No Mortgages for Americans? Signing the Contract

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While many neubau owners have to make large payments throughout the building process that require them to take early mortgages, our company offered us a simple and attractive purchasing plan in three steps:

  1. 30k Reservation fee
  2. 15% Sale price due when the contract is signed (minus reservation fee)
  3. 85% Sale price due when keys are handed over

After we visited the flat and decided we really wanted it, we paid the reservation fee and in theory, we were given a week to sign the contract.

The contract took forever to arrive though, and when it did we took it to VermögensZentrum in Zürich to have it reviewed by professionals. VZ gave us some helpful tips of things we should have changed or clarified and we had the contractor make the changes for us to sign.

There were some scary tidbits in the contract that we couldn’t change due to the fact that I am not Swiss (which I’ll mention later), but overall everything looked good. However it took ages for the contractor to remember to include the motorcycle parking space that Kay wanted for his bike so we kept waiting.

Kay was also in Cambodia for a month traveling, so much of the back and forth about the contract was done by email in German. It was pretty frustrating at times if I didn’t understand something and Kay was hard to contact. I met him in Singapore for holiday and it was there that we had our first big scare about buying because I am American.

While VZ ist not a bank, they also offer mortgages and they notified us that while we were qualified to buy the flat, they no longer offer mortgages to Americans due to the new implications FATCA brings to financial institutions outside the US. They were warning us that it might not be possible to buy unless we came up with an additional 160,000CHF so Kay could buy the flat by himself. Riiight. Like we have that kind of money laying around…

“Whatever!”, I thought. We were already pre-approved for a mortgage with Axa-Winterthur, so we are fine.

Kay was nervous though. So when I got back from Singapore, he had me contact Axa to see if they would still accept us even though it had only been a month since I’d met with them. But sure enough, when I contacted our insurance representative again, he told me,

“I’m sorry, but three weeks ago we changed our policy. Axa-Winterthur is no longer accepting Americans for mortgages.”

SHIT.

I started contacting other banks and insurance companies about their mortgage offers. No, no, no.

When Raiffeisen told me over the phone that they aren’t accepting American customers, I felt my stomach sink further than it has in years. This is not something about myself I can “fix”. I am American and I am only American. I do not have another citizenship, nor can I toss aside my only citizenship to free myself from these prejudices.

It was a sobering experience. Ten of the fifteen banks I contacted told me they flat out do not accept Americans anymore. I’ll write you all the reasons why I loathe FATCA later, but I understand the viewpoint of the Swiss institutions. It is a PIA for them to fill out paperwork for the IRS just because their customer is American. The IRS’s filing requirements for Americans living and working abroad are unfair for everyone involved, so many places here are taking the decision to simply avoid working with Americans.

It left a hard decision for us though. Kay had come home from traveling in April. The flat we reserved would not be ready for over a year and we had no idea which banks would say “yes” or “no” to Americans by the time we need to pay step #3.

Would we risk committing to buy a flat and not being able to finance it later because we are rejected for mortgages based on my citizenship?

Hell yes, we did!

We had around 5 banks that said they still accepted Americans, so it’s not like we couldn’t get a mortgage. We even had another big bank pre-approve us again before we bought and we were moderately happy with the terms. The risk is that we might not have the best mortgage offers available to Swiss and non-Americans, but that’s a risk we were willing to take in order to buy.

Have you read up about FATCA yet? It’s really not well thought out. But more on that later.

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