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A Sideboard Comes Home

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The week before our Christmas party, it seriously felt like we were doing everything at once. Couch, lighting, sideboard = Lots of money and sweat putting everything together.

Kay and I loved the first sideboard so much that we contacted the owner and scheduled a pickup on what I now know was one of the only snowy days this entire winter. (We have not had any polar vortexes in Switzerland this year…)

We picked up the sideboard on a Saturday morning with a rented truck and boy was it heavy! This thing is massive. We were incredibly lucky that it juuust barely fit in our lift, because I was not sure how I would help carry it up the stairs.

Kay was really impressed by how heavy and well-built the sideboard was. It was no IKEA piece of furniture and when we got it home and Kay tinkered with the switch, the lighting worked no problem.

I love it!! It is a little taller than the other sideboard option and so for a buffet, it is maybe a tad too tall for shorter guests, but we’ll see how it goes with dinner parties. We do have a lot of room for serving nibbles on the table and in the kitchen.

And I really like the way the light toned wood contrasts to our floors.  Once we had it at home, I didn’t really want to paint it anymore since the condition is so good, but Kay was unsure.

I set up all our booze in the glass cabinets to show them off. I’m looking forward to not have to dust all the liquor so often now that it is behind glass.

And in the middle we could fill the drawers with excess items from the kitchen like ice cube trays and thermos.

And in the bottom section we can store our less-often-used appliances like the crockpot, fondue pot, toaster and raclette machine.

We are both really happy with the sideboard purchase. It is the first big, non-IKEA item in the living room and I feel like it makes our house look a little less like an IKEA catalogue. 

Now that we have had it for a few months, I think I am getting closer to convincing Kay that it would not be worth all the effort to sand, paint and finish the sideboard in a lime green color. I really like it natural. It looks very warm and inviting. What do you think?

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Philips Lighting

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Some time ago, Kay and I caught a sale for Philips lighting going on in a local Swiss store and we picked up two of these two-light spots from the Philips Instyle line.

Kay, my favourite personal electrician, put them up immediately when we got home, but he was disappointed that they were not nearly as bright as he had hoped. He’s kind of obsessed with spotlights.

We tend to bicker about what kind of lighting to get and have a hard time agreeing on light fixtures. He usually wants spots for lots of bright light whereas I would like an aesthetically pleasing light that provides comforting, warm light.

The Ledino spots do provide a nice warm light, but I have to agree with Kay that they are not especially bright. Still, it is a big step up from having to rely solely on the fluorescent lighting that came with the bathroom mirrors and I am much happier to use only the Philips lights unless I really need to see something clearly. (Who wants to see their wrinkles and pimples in bright light at 6 in the morning anyway??)

We were happy to get a slight deal on these lights, but we still haven’t decided on anything for the bedrooms, where we are still using the make-shift shade lamps that Kay put up so long ago.

In the kitchen, we were pretty set with the idea of getting this four-spot Ledino light for 379CHF:

And in the dining room, we found a lovely three-bulb spot in store that actually came in an impressive 5 spot version online.

The only problem with the 5-spot light is that it cost like 1000CHF, so even though we knew we wanted this light since about May 2013, we waited to buy it.

How long did it take you to decide the lighting in your house? Did you do it step-by-step?

All pictures from Philips.

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Swiss Features: Rolling blinds

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There are a few features in our new house that I feel are fairly Swiss or European compared to US homes, so I wanted highlight them as I have time to take some photos.

First up are our automatic rolling blinds.

I had these at the first house I moved into in Switzerland but I have not had them in every house or flat I’ve lived in. I consider them kind of luxurious. They are basically big blinds on the outside of your house so you don’t have to deal with all the muck and dust on blinds within your home… and they are a lot more sturdy and hard-wearing than traditional American blinds.

Some Swiss houses have manual rolling shutters that you have to crank by hand, but these ones have buttons for up, down and stop in the middle of the switch. They are sooo convenient and I kind of love them.

I honestly wish we had had the option to have them in the bedroom because it would be SO much darker with them. They are really great for blocking out light.

My only complaint with ours are that there are two sets of shutters in the living room and the switches are not together so if you want to open or close both of them, you need to walk the length of the hallway and switch each shutter individually, which can be slightly annoying if you are heading out of the flat and want to shut off everything from the door.

We also have two for each set of windows in the kitchen. If we had gotten a flat on the side of the complex we actually would have these shutters everywhere, but we strangely landed on the side of the building with green plantation shutters on the bedroom side of the units. More on how those work later!

How do you shut out light in your house? Do you have different treatments for different rooms?

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Searching for a Sideboard

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Kay and I talked for months about buying a sideboard for our dining area. We searched in many stores in Zürich and didn’t quite find something we liked, but Kay had the idea that we could buy something used on the cheap and paint it bright green to echo the green going on in our kitchen.

We visited several crazy overpriced used stores in Zürich with sideboards costing 2000-5000CHF (ouch!!) before I headed to my favourite used sites, Ricardo and Ricardolino which has since re-branded to Olx but I can never remember the name. I think they may have run into some legal trouble with Ricardo over names…

Anyhoo, I pulled up several comps for Kay in the price range of 100-400CHF and we whittled our choices down to these two:

I found several sideboards with built in lighting, which I knew Kay would love. He is an LED junkie! Most of the options were too expensive, but I liked the look of this one a lot and it was only 150CHF. It would just be harder to paint green. I was also concerned that if we get glass doors we cannot fill the sideboard with extra crap from the kitchen as I was intending.

Option two was the much simpler, all-wooden doors for about 125CHF. I knew it would be a lot easier to paint, but I didn’t know about the quality of the wood on either piece and if we would encounter strange varnishes or evil veneering. But with this option we could hide so many things in there and customize the doors with some handles similar to our kitchen cupboards if we wanted.

We measured both sideboards out to get an idea how much space they would take up and they were both pretty good sizes for our large dining space.

Next I photoshopped both sideboards to be electric green like our kitchen color. You know how bright it is!

Kay always thinks it is interesting to see color choices in Photoshop first and I agree, but I am not sold on the green. It is SO bright. It would make a huge statement.

Some how, the idea of making an entire sideboard this green seems like a much bigger commitment than the tiny strip of wall above the kitchen cabinets and I feel a bit guilty at the prospect of painting over what could be beautiful natural wood.

If we did go with the first option and painted it, it would be clear that the shelves and inside area through the glass doors would also need to be painted something, maybe white or we thought about a mirror foil for a spacey look.

They are just ideas, but whew… that green. I don’t know! Maybe we should keep a neutral sideboard and work on integrating some contrasting green into the living/dining room somewhere else.

What kind of bold color decisions have you made in your house?

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Tricky Swiss Realty Ads

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As an expat in Switzerland, navigating the realty here can be intimidating in the beginning. It is easy to feel confused when searching through listings in German.

After living here for several years and searching for both rentals and houses for sale, I have noticed a couple points about the listing titles. Here are a few rough translations to explain.

This means that the apartment is really pretty small, but supposedly “nice”. Often you can find nice little luxury apartments or well kept spaces, but in general “Klein aber fein” means overpriced for how small it is.

I would definitely use this term to describe our $3000 a month one bedroom. It was beautiful and well-equipped and the view and luxury are worth it to some, but in our case I was ready to move on.

This generally means the house is in poor or terrible condition, but you can renovate it if you have the stomach for Swiss labor costs.

They are not always awful and sometimes you can find a great deal on a nice forever house, but most of the time they are so outdated or in bad repair that you wonder how people live in them.

Once I saw a house with a bathroom (bathtub and toilet) in the kitchen – a throwback to the olden days when the kitchen was the only room in the house with water pipes. But I don’t need a toilet in my food prep space, thank you.

Kay didn’t want to look at anything with Ausbaupotential because we were not planning on getting involved with any renovation projects at the moment. Or maybe ever. I don’t see Kay ever being that keen on self renovation or an old house.

This basically means that the place is overpriced and probably not affordable for you. Unless you happen to earn over a million a year or have several millions saved up in your account for the deposit, just look away.

Don’t spend too much time ogling luxury villas like I do.

Unlike “Toplage” listings, it’s usually a good thing when a listing is right on top of a public transportation stop. You will pay more money to be next to a train station. Prices go down if you are only next to a tram, even less for buses and if the listing requires a car to get to and from work, it had better be darn well cheap!

Those are just a few of the common listing terms I saw when I was searching to buy our home. If you are looking up rentals you need to watch out for three important things:

  1. “möblierte” apartments are furnished. Watch out if you are not looking for a furnished flat. There are plenty of them around.
  2. “WG” which stands for “Wohngemeinschaft” and means a shared flat. If you found a great price (1200CHF) on a four bedroom in downtown Zürich, it probably means that is the price for one of the rooms, not the whole flat.
  3. “Befristet” apartments. Chances are that flat is a great price because it is either being subleased for a limited period or it is due for a renovation. Either way, the leases on temporary apartments are usually 1-11 months. That can be good if you are looking for a temporary solution, but don’t fall in love and move into a flat that you’ll have to move out of in a couple months.

Do you notice any common listing terms on the realty around you?