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We have a mortgage!

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By the time March rolled around, we decided it was time to figure out our mortgage once and for all. Our list of places that work with Americans despite FATCA requirements had grown smaller compared to last year, so we only had 4 banks to choose from compared to the 30+ that most Swiss have available to them.

Still, Kay went to all of them (ZKB, UBS, CS and a local bank Linth) and told them we wanted to see some offers for either 100% Libor mortgages or 100% 5 year fixed mortgages.

Unlike the US, 20-30 year mortgages don’t really exist here. The highest model offered to people is usually a 10 year fixed mortgage. As I’ve said before, the point of your mortgage is not to pay the whole house back by then. After 10 years, you simply have to refinance your mortgage for another 1-10 years, depending on your plans. If you would secure a 10 year mortgage, it is usually not in your interest to try to “sell off” the mortgage with the house. Unless interest rates have skyrocketed, a 10 year fixed rate is usually more than what buyers would be able to find on their own for the same amount of time left on your mortgage. Buying a place with a 30 year mortgage and then selling it off? Forget about it. It doesn’t work like that here.

Since we are coming to a crossroads in about five years, we do not want to be tied to the flat longer than that. Five year fixed rates are also MUCH cheaper than 10 year fixed rates, so that’s a bonus too.

Kay went back and forth between the banks and let the bankers battle it out… we were just interested in getting the best rate possible, which we made clear from the start! It came down to a very exciting hour as Kay was calling me telling me he’d had both guys on the phone and needed to call one of them back and make a decision…. soooo, we went with the small bank!

Bank Linth bent over backwards to meet our goals and they were very excited that we promised to move all our money over to them. I am a little sad to leave English online-banking and paperwork (ugh, German paperwork… ugh!) but it will be good for me. (Hopefully.) And the advisor at Bank Linth was really the nicest out of all the people we met with.

UBS? I was really disappointed. We have almost all our money with them now and then sent this stodgy old man to talk to us. He didn’t even try offering us a first-time buyers mortgage like ZKB did. And when he heard we had better offers than him, he just said “Oh, that’s too low! We can’t do anything about it.” Not really a salesman in my eyes. I’d much rather work with a small bank and receive the care and attention we deserve. (Ok, I think we deserve it…!)

Homebuyers, did you go for a big bank or somewhere local? How did you make the choice?

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How to Pass on Your Rental Lease

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Normally in Switzerland you can only move out in April or September, so despite giving our rental agency 7 months notice before moving out… we were responsible for finding new tenants.

The agency told us that they would list our flat on one of the popular listing sites, but when we reached the typical 3 month mark before moving, our flat was still not online so I decided to make a fancy PDF to distribute among friends and family workplaces.

I made sure to highlight our address and set up a gmail account for the replies from the ad. We wrote all the important flat details in both German and English and I included lots of pretty pictures taken in the flat or from the balcony. I included some from when we were moving and the place was empty and some with furniture to give people a better sense of space.

I also took the time to measure out the entire flat and draw a floor plan so that people would know the approximate size and layout of the flat.

Thankfully we did have a fair amount of interest regarding the flat. So much that I set up two visitation days for people to come view the place…. which meant I had to clean pronto!

Kay was gone during the week before the visitation so I cleaned up the dining room, living area, laundry room… tidied my desk and then attacked my open wardrobe.

My wardrobe does not have space to have the doors because of the exposed beams in the room, so it was extra important that it be tidy. I took a few tips from my friend Jeannine over at Small Chic Home and took 1/5 the clothes out of the wardrobe and rearranged everything to look neutral (dark) in the drawer area to the left.

…yes, I only ever keep pretty bags on my wardrobe shelves and I never stuff them full of clothes. Cough cough.

It’s pretty much the cleanest my wardrobe has ever looked!

With everything put in its place, the place looked great!

I took out the orchids from the bathroom where they live and placed them around the flat to add some greenery.

All our laundry was hidden away in the laundry room as well… usually it’s hanging out next to the balcony door up there.

And last but not least, I made Kay sweet rolls for breakfast on Monday and they just happened to come out of the oven right before the visitors arrived… (because I am evil like that.)

We did advertise the place as a 2 room (or 1 bedroom in US), but some people saw the floor plan I drew and really thought the laundry room could be a second bedroom, making the place a 3 room flat. Alas, the ceiling is all attic in that room and there is a big washer and dryer taking up a lot of room… not really a bedroom by any means!

But we did have people who loved the flat and wanted to apply right away. In the end, we were able to find a tenant to take the place over immediately after we move out so we can avoid paying double rent!

What kind of tactics do you use to get out of a lease on time?

Food

Dolder Grand

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If you noticed I’ve been kind of absent lately, you might wonder what I’ve been up to. Truthfully I downloaded candy crush for iPhone a few weeks ago and I have kind of abandoned my Kindle and blogging in lieu of zapping those little candies every chance I get. *Hangs head in shame*

I do go out of the house still though… a couple weeks ago Kay’s brother invited his parents and us to the Dolder Grand in Zürich for a pretty fancy brunch. Dolder is a five star hotel and wellness spa and it is $$$. I had never eaten there so far…

Like most family events, this also required going to church together first, much to the “joy” of Kay’s father. After sitting in the unheated church for an hour (brrr!), it was time for brunch! And oh what a brunch it was…

I started off with duck on hummus, wasabi cream filled cones, and an assortment of meats and savory items.

We all decided to try the oysters since it was a buffet and they were just sitting there, but I’m still not sure how I feel about uncooked oysters. It’s just so much “ocean” going on in your mouth. Kay had one and I knew he would hate it…

That wasabi paste in there was so creamy and delicious, but I wish I didn’t fill up on all that relatively ordinary meat. There was a wall of desserts to be had!

 

Without wasting any time, I decided that I already needed to start my dessert course before I lost any more stomach room.

I took basically all these desserts in the pictures above and below and started eating while my inlaws laughed that I was diving into dessert already. Girl’s got priorities!

You can see here how much Kay looks like his father. We make a nice looking family. 🙂

After dessert it was time to head back for some sushi, but man I was getting so stuffed already. I did not come to this brunch as prepared as I should have.

Even the bathrooms in Dolder are fancy….

Well, at 92CHF ($96) per person for the buffet (and I’m not sure coffee was included) I don’t think Kay and I will be coming back soon. It was a very good brunch, but it was very, very expensive for a buffet. Usually our brunches are more in the 20-40CHF range depending on what we order. My favourite is making waffles or pancakes at home on the weekend. 😉

How much does a good brunch in your area cost?

Switzerland

Baby Shower Treats

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Last weekend some friends and I planned a “surprise” baby shower for a friend in Zürich having her first baby. Baby showers are not common in Switzerland, but we couldn’t help wanting to shower her with gifts and good food and games. It was a lovely day, so I wanted to share a few images of our party decorations and FOOD.

I made Russian teacakes, snickerdoodles and frosted sugar cookies with Easter M&Ms and the flower painted ones. For the flowers I followed this tutorial my friend shared. They were a bit tricky because my piping bag didn’t have small enough nozzles, so I had to dump all my frosting in a ziplocked baggy and cut a much smaller hole to use.

I also made my first diaper cake for the shower! After seeing one at work, I thought it would be a great centerpiece for the party so I set to work making it. I’m thinking of making a tutorial later on to show how I made mine with a cost breakdown.

My friend also has the cutest, most feminine coffee table! In love.

The lady hosting the party at her house got decorations online and they really added to the party feel at the flat.

As you can see, there was a ton of food for our tea party theme and we all stuffed ourselves silly!

Even though lots of desserts were bought and brought from lots of people, they all worked with the baby theme.

One friend put together a Johnson and Johnson basket full of goodies.

Funnily enough, my friend couldn’t figure out where to get the helium balloon filled so she just hung it up on the wall. Gotta do what works! 🙂

Also, doesn’t bubbly just make any party picture look even more divine? 😉

I tried to be healthy and eat salad and fritatas before I gorged myself on cookies and the green tea ice cream below. I was SO full when I left!

What kind of goodies do you make or take to baby showers?

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Neubau Progress: Bathroom

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After we signed for the flat we had to get down to business. Building was on a schedule and we needed to decide all of our customizations asap. Obviously the whole bathtub/shower switcheroo didn’t really work out like we wanted it to, but we could still change a few things in the bathrooms. We started out with drawings of the bathroom plans:

The guest bath above and the master bath below.

The architecture firm gave us a load of bathroom options online, but really we needed to head to Sanitas Troesch to “bemuster” or pick out all our customizations.

Since we couldn’t have a fancy bath, we went with the standard D-Code tub, but for the shower we upgraded the evil sliding doors to a solid glass wall on one side and a glass door on the other side. The thought was “Less moving parts, less mold”…

I was surprised again that we had to specify that we wanted a shower bar in the bathtub so that we could put the shower head high enough to shower. Um yeah, you didn’t let us swap the shower and the bathtub, but I still feel it is important to be able to actually shower in my damn master bath. Crazies.

If you’ll notice below lots of the pictures it says “kostenneutral”. This became a very common word in my German vocabulary because it means “cost neutral” and it meant those choices were included in the base price of the flat. Anything else had a price… and as we found out with the electric, everything would have a parts cost + labor + general contractor fee + builder’s tax + VAT tax on all that. Guh. But anyway, we were still going to make some changes!

It was a little scary though, because in Sanitas Troesch they gave us a million options and decisions to make and it was really easy to say “Let’s add this” here or there, not knowing what it would add up to. Some of the original picks were also no longer available because they were discontinued, so sadly sometimes we had to choose options that cost more that we didn’t even like as much (like our towel hooks, argh!)

It was nice seeing the fixtures in real life though. Kay really liked one of the more modern looking faucets that was cost neutral, but it had a very strange hinge attachment that I could foresee dirt/mold/soap scum collecting in and being a pain to clean. Everything I saw for the bathroom fixtures was being judged on my “cleanablity” scale. I do not want mold in our new flat! I convinced Kay that I didn’t want to be jamming q-tips up into the faucet handle to clean it, so we were going with the “boring” standard faucets. I think he’ll get over it.

Some bits were confusing too… Swiss have this thing about built-in soap dishes, cups, etc… that I find a bit strange, but they are in literally every house here. The sales man just sort of asked us what we wanted and where, but I kept wanting to know, “How much does that extra soap dish cost??” It was a bit stressful.

Toilets and sinks were an easy decision. We picked the prettier (rounder) cost neutral toilet. Not paying $2250 for that boxy toilet up there. And while I’m not necessarily in love with our double sink style, I also didn’t want to pay thousands to upgrade that either.

Our “chosen sink” came with a pretty naff cabinet underneath. Check that out? What is that space for?? Gathering dust? I wasn’t having that. Knowing me, I’d squish tissue boxes and bath supplies in there and it would totally ruin the clean, tidy look I’m hoping we’ll have in the bathroom. Not to mention, it would be a bitch to clean around those sinks. No, no this was not the cabinet for us.

Since we were picking everything out in as much detail as we wished, we were able to look through Sanita’s catalogue and I decided I wanted to go for a more traditional type of cabinet, while Kay was sad not to have more modern ones. The big drawers above seemed like they would be a pain to organize and I really wanted more drawers and some traditional hinge cabinets, so we came up with the option below. I just wanted everything to be practical!

But after we signed for everything, Sanitas came back and told us the cabinets above would be impossible with our double sink because the drawers would run into the faucets in the middle. We could change it slightly and put drawers in the middle and cabinets on the outside or all flat cabinets, but it ruined my idea of splitting up drawers between Kay and myself, so we said “screw it” and went with the original giant drawer below:

And honestly, I can’t really remember if it is the one above or if it will really have two drawers… the decision came after the bathroom contract and it’s been so long since we decided everything that I’m afraid when we check the finished flat, we’ll have forgotten what we even chose if we don’t have the proper documentation for it. I’m only left with the plans that still include the cabinet and drawer combo above. (Things like this keep me up at night…)

For the half bath, we were surprised to learn that it didn’t come with an under sink cabinet at all. That just wouldn’t do. I mean, I plan on putting toilet paper and crap for guests under there. And tampons. You know, IMPORTANT stuff.

We went with a simple two door cabinet because they don’t make the gianormous drawer cabinets in this width. I am happy.

I am even happy with our giant drawer. I was unsure how I felt about it when we first decided everything, but now I think it will be nice an streamlined and hopefully not too hard to organize…

Along with the master bath and guest bath we were surprised to learn this was when we had to pick out our basement cellar sink for the wash room. A small dinky sink came with the flat price, but we upgraded it a tad (at least I think we did…!) bigger sink. Kay convinced me that we don’t need a crazy laundry sink with ridges for scrubbing, because let’s be honest… how often do I hand wash things?

After a few rounds, all the bathrooms were sorted and we were on to bigger, bolder decisions.

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