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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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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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