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Einbauschränke – Wardrobes

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Since July we have been living with two clothes racks and the rest of our clothes in suitcases and boxes. It is starting to drive me a *little* bit nuts. We’ve driven to Germany twice now to investigate about building some built-in wardrobes (otherwise referred to as Einbauschränke in our household) in our bedroom.

The whole idea of a built-in wardrobe is actually more in line with an American closet system. Typical Swiss bedrooms are rectangles with no closets, which dismays many Americans, including my mother. Swiss usually have a tall wardrobe for hanging things and sometimes a dresser for storing other items.

Wardrobes are by far more popular than dressers and just like you move your light fixtures with you from apartment to apartment, the wardrobe usually comes too… unless you are lucky enough to sell it so that you do not have to move them!

We thought that the idea of building a built-in wardrobe would be better because we can avoid using anything for the back of the wardrobe, thus avoiding mold problems in our fresh new build. It would also be a more permanent solution that hopefully adds to the value of our home.

After visiting a few different places, I’m almost sure we will work with Möbeldick after seeing all the Noteborn wardrobes in their store.

Noteborn has tons of options for built-in and standalone wardrobes, with finishes in wood, glass, with frame or frameless doors and all kinds of inside options.

It was a little overwhelming trying to figure out what we want inside the wardrobe.

After living with our other wardrobes for four years, I was sure that I wanted more drawers! The problem is that they are pretty darn expensive! Each drawer is about €250 or $337 a piece. Ouch!

But I do not want to live without some drawers and this is pretty much the cheapest we can get for built-in wardrobes, so we are a little stuck.

How much money would you put into your clothes storage system? Do you have fancy American closets I can be jealous of? Tell all in the comments. 🙂

(All images via Noteborn.)

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…and then THIS happens.

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One week after living in our flat, I came home to this in our guest bathroom:

Maybe I need to preface a bit… a few days after we moved in, the workers finishing the business space below our flat knocked on our door and said they were searching for the source of a water leak. We let our tap in our guest bathroom run for ten minutes and they verified that their was a problem with the pipes behind our walls.

Somehow, they had failed to notice this plumbing error in the year and a half that we were waiting for them to finish our flat. I’m sure if the water had actually been turned on for our pre-acceptance visit they might have noticed this problem before we moved in. Great planning guys.

Instead, with most of our boxes still packed up and scattered around the house, we had to give our key over to some people working for Allreal that we don’t really know or have a personal contract with. (Accountability??) Then we had who knows how many workers coming in and out of our house to repair the pipes, fix the wall and re-tile.

Our bathroom cabinet and mirror were dismantled and all hope of unpacking and organizing the guest bathroom and hallway closets was lost.

To say that I was less than impressed with Allreal would be an understatement. After all our problems with them messing up the grout and taking the lazy/shitty method of fixing their mistake, they had to rip tiles out anyway to fix their plumbing error. I was furious!

Whereas we used to enjoy a separate toilet and shower room in Zürich, suddenly we were reduced to one bathroom in the morning. It made showering and sharing more difficult for an already tired, sore and grumpy Katie.

Allreal fixed the pipes relatively quickly, but they had to keep coming each day to re-do the wall, re-tile and grout everything. In the mean time we locked our office every day for security reasons, and I stupidly almost lost the office key and spent an infuriating 30 minutes searching for it when I got home one night, wanting to organize and unpack the locked office.

Busting open the wall also coated our entire flat in a thin layer of dust that you can see when I rolled up the floor protection for the weekend. I realized that in addition to everything being covered in dust, whenever we walked on the floor cover, we would just track all the crap on top of it all over the rest of the house and after awhile we were both walking around with grimy feet.

This coat of dust made it all the way around the house through closed doors as well. I still have to wipe down all the kitchen cabinets, all the tiles and surfaces in the bathrooms, wash the floors and at some point wash the surfaces in the living room, bedroom and office.

That doesn’t make moving any easier folks.

By the weekend they had patched the wall up, but they still had to paint it and grout around the sink cabinet.

In the mean time, I was swiffering to at least make the place walkable over the weekend. Just a little work and look what was all over my Swiffer!

After a week and a half or so of repairs, we arrived home and the floor protection was gone. But our key was not returned… It appeared as though they were done, but I noticed they forgot to grout between the floor molding and the wall tiles, so we have a nice gap in the wall where water could run between the wall. Again, I was not impressed.

And throughout the whole week… the toilet paper roll in the guest bathroom started dwindling until it was gone. Now, since neither Kay nor I were using the toilet during the repairs, I am kind of thinking we had some random men shitting in our home while we were at work. Just a hunch… I’ll never know, but we also found a very random, disgusting spot of blood (?) on the toilet rim when their work was done. If that doesn’t gross you out… well, what would?

Maybe it sounds harsh that I wouldn’t want workers using our toilet, but there has been an open public toilet with two stalls available halfway down the stairs in our building plus lots of port-o-potties outside. And I’d be fine with them taking a leak in there, but the fact that they used up an entire roll of toilet paper just ticks me off.

Other than that, I was finally free to organize this bathroom finally (and CLEAN it!!) Which reminds me I wanted to tell you about how Allreal did a crappy job re-grouting our tiles. See the soap dispenser and the towel grip and everything below? Guess who was too lazy to remove the bathroom fixtures and cabinets before re-grouting?

Just guess!

Of course I didn’t notice during our inspection, but afterward I was inspecting our towel hooks because the ones we wanted were discontinued and I’m not totally happy with the ones we ended up with. I thought it was strange why there was white grout all around the edges of the fixture, so I unscrewed it to discover this:

Jep. Those jerks drilled out all the grout in the bathroom, but DIDN’T EVEN REMOVE THE FIXTURES. WTF. This is as bad as leaving the light switch covers on and painting around them, which they actually ALSO DID. Lazy fucks! We have to cut all the outlet covers off any time Kay wants to change something to our outlets because there is paint all over them, gluing them to the walls.

The grout looked especially stupid when they removed the bathroom cabinets for the repair and you could see where they squished the white grout in and where the old grey grout was still there. Unbelievably lazy.

The “quality” of Allreal:

That’s supposed to be a straight line of white grout. If that’s their definition of quality, well… it’s certainly not “Swiss quality.”

Below the sink I encountered more of their genius. During inspection I thought it was clever that they put that hole in the shelf so that I can raise the shelf higher around the pipes, until I actually went to do so.

Look who drilled the shelf hole slightly too far forward so that it does not function at all. Comical.

Kay said he can maybe cut further back so that we can get the shelf around the hole, but one has to wonder why they even bothered drilling a hole there at all if they weren’t going to measure it. Really.

And after they took the protection sheet off the floor, they managed to get grout or paint or something on the floor leading to the door. We complained about it and when they finally returned our key (while simultaneously tracking dusty footprints all over the living room and into the kitchen) they had smudged or sanded the floor a bit, but the marks are all still clearly visible below. For a brand new home, it’s disappointing.

The final straw was when I was sitting on my throne in our master bath and I realized there is a crack in the toilet seat that is only really visible when pressure is put on the seat. Maybe they came and shat in this bathroom too? I wouldn’t put it past them.

I give up! I thought owning a brand new home was supposed to come with less problems.

Let this post be a testament to Allreal’s craftsmanship (or lack thereof). There has been a lot of talk about quality going downhill when people here hire foreign labor with cheaper overhead and I’m pretty sure all our flat’s problems are a direct result of untrained workers and lack of supervision.

We will also have to live with most of the mistakes as they are “within the tolerance” as Allreal so eloquently puts it. They don’t care that I can still see traces of grey grout in ALL the tiles in the bathrooms on both the white and the dark grout and I’m sure they don’t care that we have paint all over our outlet covers.

Just take caution in case you ever think of hiring this company to build for you. And then don’t hire them.

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Homeowners!

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It’s been a crazy couple weeks as the internet was cut, we moved and waiting to get back online at the new place. Oh how I missed internet! Sweet, sweet internet.

On the Friday of our move we got up at 6:45am to get to the notary office by 8am sharp. Our appointment (all in Swiss German, yikes!) didn’t last long. We were given some papers to read over and sign and then the deed was officially, legally passed over.

After we were done at the notary we popped into the Gemeindehaus to register because we had de-registered in Zürich the day before. (You must register where you live with the authorities at all times, no gaps!) Kay paid 20CHF for us to re-register and 45CHF went to the Bundesamt für Migration (immigration) simply because I am a foreigner. 😉

I asked if I could complete my new Ausländerausweis at the same time because we married in the summer so every July/August I have to do it. But I forgot that I have to get the stupid form signed by my employer, despite the fact that my permit is supplied directly through my Swiss spouse. Argh. That means another trip to the Gemeindehaus for me! (I joked to Kay that I should be a house wife so my forms are easier to fill out!) When I returned to the Gemeindehaus with my signed permit form, I paid an additional 102CHF for my annual foreign residence permit, putting my fees 147CHF over a normal person like Kay’s. Le sigh.

Back at the flat we completed our inspection and things looked… surprisingly OK. The grout job in the bathroom was still not as good as if they had done it correctly the first time, but to be honest, I’m pretty anal about the small details. But I’ll get into that later… with our keys in hand, we were finally home owners!!

Up next, the move!

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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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Vorabnahme : Pre-acceptance Visit

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Pre-acceptance. The point at which our new build was supposed to be “finished”.

It also marked the one official point during the building process where we could survey the flat and address any issues which must be changed before our contractor hands the key over in July. I had both anticipated and feared this day since we signed our sales contract in April 2012.

With only eight short weeks after our pre-acceptance appointment, we wanted the flat to be as perfect as possible without any glaring mistakes before we got to this meeting. This is the reason why we made sure to visit our flat as often as possible during building, so we could verify that no time-intensive or irreversible mistakes were made.

On May 12th, I stayed up late into the night preparing the list of all lists indicating the mark and make of almost everything in our flat. What color is the floor? Is it the right material? Is the fridge the right model? And so on… So when we started out in the kitchen on May 13th, I could open the dishwasher and check my list to see that it really was the correct model we ordered.

Yup. It was.

But not everything was finished. Our appliances were all in, but the kitchen floor and wall tiles were not yet installed. That utility shaft hole was also still in the process of being patched up. Hrrmph.

But our granite counters were in and they looked great. Below you can see that they still need to trim the cabinet door for the trash system to close properly.

The contractor meeting us there (the one we kind of loathe for never answering our emails or calls and always going on holiday) walked around the flat marking cracks or wall defects that still need fixed. It almost made him seem useful! Below is the other side of the utility shaft from the living room side where we saw the hole before.

But other than not being finished, I was pretty happy with the kitchen.

The electricity was not turned on yet so we couldn’t test that or the temperature controls. Nor could we test the air ducts in any of the rooms and because the window handles were not installed for security reasons (workers could leave them open and people could break in) we couldn’t open and test the windows. The shutters were also not installed yet.
Have you already noticed a growing list of things “not done” yet?

Workers actually were pretty lazy about installing the wood molding into the apartment and the screws are not flat. Many hang out quite a bit and could catch on something. They look shitty when you look at them from standing, but our contractor doesn’t think this is a problem because it is “within the tolerance”. We’ll see about that. I’m mostly concerned that if we think it looks shitty and we try to sell the flat to someone else, they’ll say it looks shitty too. And that would be a problem.

This is inside our built in wardrobe, where I mentioned to you last time we are expecting an outlet to show up at some point:

Yep, still no outlet there. But a nice little picture…

And the main difference from the last time we saw the house is that they have now installed the bathroom hardware for the soap dishes and toilet paper holders.

Almost there!

We checked the height of the hardware, opened mirrors and counted the shelves included. We tried to be pretty thorough, but the contractor was moving through the flat pretty quickly and with his assistant and Kay, we had four people trying to shuffle through all the places in the flat at the same time… it got a bit tight in the half bath and pantry!

For now, all the soap dishes and cup holders for the bathroom are wrapped up somewhere safe to be handed over when we get the keys.

I was a little disappointed the glass shower cabin and towel rack are not installed yet. Something else to check later!

Inside we checked for outlets and shelves.

We couldn’t go outdoors because the darn balcony/window handles situation, so all the balcony doors were shut, but here you can see they are still in the process of laying the tiles and building up the privacy fences.

We have been told that fence should continue the rest of the way and not suddenly become so short. I really hope that is the case or we’ll get to know our neighbors very well… No sunbathing for me?

View from the balcony looking over towards the kitchen side of the flat.

The master bath. Oh the master bath.

By the time we got here we’d been through the kitchen, living room, hallway, pantry, guest bath, guest bedroom and master bedroom. It was actually the last place we visited and the first place we really noticed something huge.

Here you see all our bathroom hardware in and it looks great. The whole bathroom looks great at first glance.

Then I look over here and check my all encompassing List. “Grouting color” I read. Hmm.

Hmmm….  HMMMM….!

We were pretty specific about the bathroom and kitchen tile grout. We wanted white grout on the walls and black grout to match the floor tiles. You know… all light, all dark.  You know what those lazy suckers did?

Yeah, they used light grey for everything. Fuck!

All of the sudden I was overwhelmed by this ugly grey grout. “No, no, no” I was saying. “This is not what we ordered.”

I went back and checked the shower, which of course was the same. Why didn’t either of us notice this when we visited the flat a couple weeks before? Re-doing the grout is a huge pain requiring lots of work for them to rip out all the tiles and redo properly. I really would have liked to inform them of their mistake as soon as possible.

Grey, grey, everywhere. Make it go away!

We actually wrote them several times about the grout color, called them on the phone and then Kay even went in person to the bloody tile appointment IN the flat to discuss which color goes where and how they lay it. We literally could not have done anything else other than to grout it ourselves (which wasn’t really allowed.) And they still screwed up.

Grrrrrrrrrrr. I took one more look at our problem and left.

We had a couple issues to deal with after our pre-acceptance, with the top three issues being our main problems.

1. Grout color wrong in all tiles (we hope to have them install the kitchen ones properly!)

2. Threshold from bathroom to bedroom or hallway is not even. Larger on one side than the other (measured with coins). Fixing this would also require them to completely redo the floor to make it even.

3. Wood molding: Crappy installation

4. Tiles not installed in kitchen yet

5. Some cracks and spots on walls here and there

6. Trash can cabinet not trimmed yet

7. The spots in the hallway were on but you could not turn them off. That might be because the electricity wasn’t turned on properly to the house yet.

8. Plumbing/Electricity/Air ducts all need to be turned on and checked

9. Balcony needs to be finished

10. Soap dispenser in kitchen needs installed.

11. Soap dispenser needs to be installed

12. Wardrobe socket needs to be installed

That was about it! The company would have eight weeks to fix all these problems and finish the flat before we move out of ours. If they don’t do it on time, they’ll have to pay for a hotel for us, so I’m sure they are itching to get done quickly!

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