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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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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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