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are not always awful and sometimes you can find a great deal on a nice forever house, but most of the time they are so outdated or in bad repair that you wonder how people live in them.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

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Building Dramas Build

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After we left our Vorabnahme, Kay immediately started addressing the bathroom problem. We could ignore all the other mistakes, but the grout problem and uneven thresholds could be the ruin of our carefully planned moving weekend. See… we have, in fact, cheekily scheduled a handover of our old flat the weekend after we get the keys, so if just one thing goes wrong and we have to wait… we will be homeless.

We emailed and called in the days after our visit and our contractor said he was working on it, but two weeks after our Vorabnahme, we were still waiting for our contractor to procure the piece of paper that said which colour of grout we ordered.

How long can it take to get a little piece of paper?

After 2.5 weeks the contractor finally confirmed that yes, the grout really was the wrong color. Then they wrote that since “we” are running short on time and this really requires a lot of work to fix, they wanted to know if we would accept the defects for a price reduction.

…and we’re supposed to agree to this without knowing how much that is?

I was frustrated that instead of offering us a quote when they are short on time for repairs, they were mainly asking if they could get out of fixing their mistakes. I could live with the problems for a certain price, but I wasn’t going to accept the defects just because the contractor messed up and didn’t think the flat would be ready on time.

After three weeks we finally received a quote… and it stunned us. Bathroom renovations start around 15-25k PER bathroom here. So I was actually pretty angry to find out that they offered us a whopping 400CHF.

Um. No. A few hundred francs is not how much it would cost to fix this. If WE would get someone in there for a quote to take down all the tiles and remove the grout (or replace the tiles entirely) and then to re-do all the walls and floor to be flat without breaking any of the other hardware or furniture in the bathroom, it would probably cost us 10,000-15,000 CHF per bathroom. Because labor is just that expensive in Switzerland.

We said “no thanks” of course and the next day the tiler “reevaluated” his quote and offered us  600CHF. Whoo.

Yeah, if it’s such a cheap (for Switzerland) fix, those guys are going to fix it the way we wanted it. And they are going to do it on time, or they’ll be paying for our hotel. We didn’t expect a crazy 10-20k quote, but I had hoped they would offer us something that was reasonably fair considering how much money it will cost them to fix it themselves. But instead they just tried to shave corners and chance saving money on their errors.

So four weeks after our Vorabnahme and four weeks before we move, Kay was in Mexico and I had to call the contractor and clarify if they are taking all the tiles down or just removing the grout. Calling people in German is nerve-wracking enough anyway, but our contractor has a very thick Swiss German and to me it sounds like he has marbles in his mouth. On his cell phone reception, I barely understood anything he said.

He *could* have said that yes, they are taking all the tiles down first as we prefer. But he also could have said no, they are taking down some of the tiles and others they will just take the grout out. I’m really not sure. He said a lot of “Oh it will be done on time according to the protocol.” Very assuring. Not.

I asked him if he could confirm everything in an email “so that my husband can read it in Mexico”. Cough cough. And because I could read the email and figure out what the heck he said!!

Anyway, understanding everything or not… it was clear that he said the place will be ready on time, according to the damn protocol. And you can bet your ass we are going to have a third party surveyor with us to make sure the “protocol” is up to standard before we sign off on our home!

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Neubau Progress: Walls, Woodwork and Everything Else

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Maybe I glossed over it in previous posts, but throughout the bathroom and kitchen upgrades, we were thinking about the overall look of the house the whole time.

The contractor gave us several cost neutral “free” choices and from there we could choose if we wanted to upgrade to a different material for our floors, kitchen cabinets, bathroom tiles, etc. It would be very easy to sink several thousand francs into upgrades, so we really tried to stick to materials included in our base price.

In fact, I was sure that from the granite to choose from below, we would go with Shiva Black because it was free and what we wanted (black), however, when we went to the kitchen store to view the granite in person, Shiva Black just looked… well, boring. We opted to upgrade to Nero Marcus (maybe not the version below) that had a much better texture and glints of texture that caught your eye in the sunlight.

For kitchen cabinets we really kept it simple because not only would it cost a lot to upgrade all of them, but Kay hates cleaning our current super shiny “glanz” cabinets because they show every fingerprint. So for this we stuck to basic, Swiss white.

In the bathrooms and kitchen we would have tile and since, again, we did not want to spend a few thousand upgrading to complete black, we opted for the proCasa 342a below, which is a darker grey in reality. We figured that in the kitchen especially, having dark countertops and floors would be balanced by the white cabinets.

When I first saw the parquet options I knew that Kay would want “Eiche” and I would want “Räuchereiche” or “smoked oak”. But I didn’t think Kay would ever agree to such a dark wood, so I thought maybe we could settle in the middle with Merbau. Sure enough… his first suggestion was the Eiche, or oak.

I was pretty set on Merbau until we actually saw it in real life. It was not nearly pretty as below. It was a cheap-looking wood with many dark spots and specs that I did not care for. Surprisingly, both of us agreed that our very favorite wood was the oiled smoked oak, which is available below in a fishbone pattern.

When we actually went to the flooring business they told us that for less money, we could have the oiled smoked oak without the fishbone, which Kay is not particularly a fan of. He thinks it is too old fashioned, so I agreed we should get normal grain wood.

The salesman explained the difference between laminated wood and oiled wood and we were pretty sold on the oiled wood. It’s more natural, easier to buff out scratches and you can re-oil and re-stain it over the years as it lightens. To be honest, all of the laminated cost-neutral options seemed kind of lame once we learned the benefits of oiled wood.

Above is our bathroom cabinets veneer with the wood. They’ll never be in the same room, but they are more or less in line with each other. The planks of wood will also be this width throughout the apartment.

Below is the plan showing where the wood flooring will be installed and where the tiles will be installed. At first when we received our plan, they left the wood out of the pantry in the middle, so it was important to check that they put it everywhere they should!

With the flooring salesman we also discussed which direction the wooden planks will travel in. We thought it would make more sense for them to travel down the length of the living room, longwise, but the guy explained that wood flooring looks much better when the light coming through the windows travels down the wooden plank, so we set up the wood to travel that direction in all the rooms.

Again, when Kay had the meeting with the tile guys he had them set up the direction of the tile in the same way as the wood flooring to match.

Our flooring choices are a bit dark, but with all the white on the walls and cabinets I think it will be a nice balance. Next we can decide if we really want to do a black/red/white theme like we did for our wedding or if we want to branch into other colors like teal, green, etc… Maybe some mood boards are in our future.

Lastly, when we decided everything for the bathroom we actually had to pick out a sink for the cellar washing area and decide if we wanted to spend a ridiculous amount on the drying system below. The answer is “no”. But we are “splurging” (or being swindled, based on how you view it) for the garage storage box because I think that will be important for anyone who has a car in our parking spot down the road.

So, that’s that. Besides worrying about my toilet paper holder, I think almost all of the flat decisions have been made at this point.

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Neubau Progress: VII

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I was really worried that after January, we wouldn’t be able to see our flat again until it finished in May, but in February, Kay visited the flat for an appointment with the tile guys in the bathroom.

He noticed that in addition to the big hole we found in the kitchen, they had also drilled further into the hole outside the kitchen door. Not impressed.

Kay met with the tile guys and told them which direction we wanted the tiles to go. We also decided that since they fit perfectly on the ledge, we would use the black floor tiles on the bathroom ledge above the sink as well.

Kay sent me pictures of how the tiles would be direction-wise and he explained to me that they would be setup subway style as opposed to straight grid lines.

Kay also asked me on the phone if I was really sure I wanted white grouting on the walls, because it would cost more. Yep. I want white, white, white so I can see any dirt or grout on my bathroom walls. I think we can spare the minimal cost of upgrading here.

We also specified that we wanted the darkest grout available for the floor to match the floor tiles. My mother always had a hard time keeping the light grout in her kitchen tiles clean so I definitely didn’t want that to be an issue for us.

The rest of the flat was still kind of a crazy mess. Since they drilled the utility shaft so late, everything was a bit behind in the kitchen installation. We were also exchanging our steamer to upgrade some more, at a special, extra additional cost on us… but whatever. I was going to get my temperature controls!

Kay also snapped a photo of our curtain rails.

Small details like this are something that the company sort of glossed over, but I would wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if we have to pay to install something ourselves or if it comes standard with the flat. I was happy to see them installed.

As you can see, they are the standard double curtain rail in Switzerland. We don’t normally have fancy curtain rods, but instead these minimalistic flush curtain rails with a track for sheer privacy curtains and another for heavier blackout curtains.

Our fuse box was still a hot mess.

Here they’d already marked on the floor which direction the tiles would be laid.

And since he was there, Kay went down to the floor below ours and checked our our kitchen hole from below.

Argh, just what are they doing in the kitchen?

I think this is the flat below ours where you can see they unfortunately had already installed the kitchen cabinets when they realized they’d forgotten the utility shaft.

Well well, no point stressing when there’s nothing we can do. We just had to wait and hope they patch it all up correctly… At least our tiles will be the right color and grouting after asking three times and going to this appointment!

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Neubau Progress: Changing Doors

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While our Rohbau phase of building was done, or as our contract manager liked to think… SET IN STONE… we did want to make some intelligent tweaks regarding doors…

Remember what our floor plan looks like?

If you notice up there, in the “Reduit”, the door opens into the pantry closet. Now, I think you all agree that it doesn’t make sense to open a closet door into the closet and lose all that extremely valuable storage space. We had to change that.

But worse was in the kitchen. Because the kitchen was almost closed off without a door, we decided to keep the door option so that we would be able to totally shut off the sights and smells from dinner guests and sleeping spouses. But as the company had it planned, the kitchen door would open and partially block the windows if you left it open, which we plan to.

Well, that didn’t make any sense… so we put in our door requests and below you can see the slightly amended “new plan”.

Now we won’t have to worry about getting into the pantry and our kitchen door will spend most of its life sitting flush against the entry wall in the apartment. We just had to make sure they actually put our door frames in the correct direction!

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