Tag Archives: progress

End of Summer House Tour

I made sure to finish up the bulk of the painting before our house warming party back at the beginning of September. It was also the last warm weekend we had before the temperatures dropped to winter-like numbers, so here is a little update where things were in the house after 3 months living there.

The guest bathroom was drilled into and patched up, and to be honest not much else has been happening in there since. The workers actually put the cabinet back together crooked too (it’s a little hard to see) so we have to address that, which I’m not too excited about since this was an “off the books” exercise for them when they broke into the walls to fix the pipes. Allreal is not very helpful about fixing things that are their fault that they may happen to damage or destroy after inspections are signed off on.

At some point I would really like to buy a shelf unit for towels, but I haven’t found one tall enough that fits in the small spaces available for storing things in the bathroom. It is very echoey in there still.

We still have temporary lights up in the bedroom and office… and they are still up as I write this.

We bought a random green curtain from IKEA for the kitchen that was on sale for like 30 cents. They only had one and we realized it does nothing for privacy, but I just sort of left it up there for now.

A friend also gave us some temporary rolling curtains in the living room. They are too short, but they work for now for a little privacy.

We still just have the old couch and it looks a little out of place in the huge living room. The living room echoes a fair amount too.

Our booze shelf by the kitchen is working fine though!

And the bedroom… which really still looks like a crazy mess with the standing racks and Kay’s coat hanger that he is using as a clothes hanger. It’s really driving me nuts, but he loves using it right now.

Even with the shutters open, it doesn’t look much better in here.

From the window towards the door you can see all our boxes we still have.

And the view from the bathroom door, where it all just looks overcrowded.

In the bathroom we’ve still got the same old orange shower curtain up there. I don’t really think the fabric I bought in the States is thick enough for a shower curtain, so it’ll be awhile before I figure out how to make something long enough to replace the orange one.

And we still haven’t put the toilet paper holder up in here either, so the TP just kind of hangs out on the shelf there. But in general, the shelf and sink usually have nothing on them. (Not sure what that shaving can is doing there!) ๐Ÿ™‚

The other metal container is where we hide a few extra rolls of TP in here, since all the storage in the master bath is dedicated to travel toiletries, medicine and my extensive hair and makeup collection.

The curtain situation in the bathroom is also temporary, but it works for now. Not quite long enough, but nobody can see me shower, so it’s fine.

The office is probably the most finished room at this point, but it looks kind of messy in general because it’s an office. Here is my desk.

And then you have Kay’s, which spills out onto the floor next to him usually. I think we need some wall art to distract from the clutter!

Whelp, that’s that for now. We haven’t painted that much. We haven’t put art up. We haven’t bought that much furniture for inside, unless you count a bunch of shelving and we still need lights in most rooms.

How long did it take you to add your personal touches to your home?

Neubau Progress: VIII

After Kay’s visit with the tile guy at the beginning of February, we waited a long time until we went to the flat again.

We never received updated bathroom plans and many of the details were wrong or outdated, so by March I was starting to worry about where I would reach for my toilet paper while sat on my throne. Like, lay awake at night and worry how hard it will be to reach the loo paper kind of worrying.

Luckily Kay called and was able to set up an appointment at the end of April to come be super anal and decide exactly where my toilet paper holder goes among other things. I was very excited to see the flat for the first time since installing the floors, tiles, kitchen cabinets… practically everything!

Guest bathroom.

No doors in the shower yet, but it was exciting to see our bathroom cabinet there. Yes, I opened it to test it out. ๐Ÿ™‚

Guest bedroom:

Not much changed in here. The floors were all covered up with paper to protect them.

The fuse box in the hallway.

The reduit (pantry) where you can see the uncovered, albeit, dirty wood floors. Looks like we’ll have cleaning to do when we move in!

From the living room out onto the balcony where we saw they are now installing our tiles.

Kay surveys the living room… checking out that kitchen hole again!

Sockets were in, but not mounted.

Some things like the temperature control were already installed though. This is in the kitchen, right where I sort of wanted to put a bar table. I guess it won’t really work if there’s a light switch in the way. :/

And our beloved kitchen hole. Still there. (Not impressed.)

At this point, Kay alerted the local fire brigade about the problem so they could come in and check it out. The contractor promised it will still be fixed, but I was happy knowing that a third party was checking it out. They had better fix it!

But how exciting, our kitchen!

The floor was not in yet, nor the tiles on the walls… but I was very happy to see the new granite and white cabinets. ๐Ÿ™‚

And of course, our new fancy sink! Looking good! I’m almost excited to wash large pans in here.

Trash system not installed below the sink yet:

Our kitchen drawers. Squee!

And a view to the balcony with our tiles coming along. We didn’t get to choose the outside tiles, but I think they’ll be just fine.

Another of the living/dining room from the other side.

Temperature controls in the living room:

Our bedroom:

We also found that they had installed the hallway closets, but there was this weird gap in the wall where our outlet is. We need access to the outlet from the closet because Kay plans on sticking all our routers and internet stuff in there, so if they don’t sort out this problem, we’ve spend hundreds on a worthless outlet!

(To the left you see the outlet hole and to the right is the side of the built-in-wardrobe…)

And inside the wardrobes I was surprised to see shelves and rods!

Yay, storage! I’m going to enjoy it, because we sure as heck aren’t going to have wardrobes in our bedroom when we move in. I’ll have to wait for those… ๐Ÿ™

Whelp, at this point I got distracted by talking with the worker about where exactly to install our bathroom components, so I didn’t actually take any pictures of that. But rest assured, we put everything in sensible places. I decided not to have the toilet paper roll mounted on the wall behind the toilet because that drives me nuts, so we’ll either glue it to the side of the bathroom cabinet or use a freestanding toilet paper holder.

Want to catch up?

Neubau Progress: VI

When we got back from the States after Christmas and New Year, we tried to visit the flat that first weekend only to find out they had finally locked our building with semi-permanent doors. Oh noes! How would we see progress after this point??

Well… are sneaky. We headed back the second weekend in January with the plan of climbing the scaffolding to our balcony. From there we could still enter our flat via the balcony doors, but it was likely that it would be one of the last times we could freely enter the flat on the weekend during construction.

We noticed several holes this time… like this disturbing cutout near the entrance to the kitchen. What are they doing in there??

And this even scarier hole in the ceiling and floor of the kitchen. It looked like they had completely forgotten to build in a utilities shaft in the kitchen in 3 different apartment layouts through all five floors! They only found out their huge mistake when they started installing the kitchen cabinets and appliances in other flats and realized something was missing. Ridiculous!!!

Thankfully we are one of the last flats to be finished so they had delivered our kitchen cabinets and appliances but they hadn’t started installing them yet. To cut through the concrete they need to do it with water, and if you already have your appliances with their electric parts installed, this can only spell big trouble later on. The whole ordeal was really disconcerting.

But hey… look who finally remembered our extra sockets in the kitchen??

As you can see, the delivery of the cabinets and appliances is why all the flats are locked now, which I can’t say bothers me. I don’t want anyone stealing my oven!

Not much changed in the bathrooms since we last visited.

Not much changed in the bedrooms either…

Our bathtub did seem to have more crap dumped in it though. It looked like they were preparing to install the toilets.

Here in the master bath you can see the hot and cold water taps in our double sink as well as the piping for the sink drain. The where the mirror will be mounted will also have a little ledge behind the sink area.

From the bathroom looking to the french balcony…

The only thing really scary was that giant hole they drilled through all the apartment floors. What kind of company forgets to put a utilities shaft in? That’s a pretty big mistake. Below you can see the texture from drilling with the water jets.

Hello down there! (That’ll be office/business space below.) Let’s hope they close that up properly!

Want to catch up?

Neubau Progress: V

In December we went back to the flat and they had started plastering our walls. It was a step towards finishing!

Around this time they had also installed (or at least placed) our bathtub and shower basins!

This view is from the bedroom looking toward the hallway.

Here is a shot of the hallway where the built in closets will be placed and all the tubing for the utilities on the left.

Here is the office/guest bedroom update:

Shower basin…

Kay walking through our smoothed over flat…

And the kitchen… which still doesn’t have the bloody extra sockets we asked for in the corner!!

At this point we were kinda pissed about the electrical sockets because they had begun to plaster over everything and our sockets definitely were not there or even marked to be put in. We wrote some unhappy letters at this point.

More of the hallway:

A week or two after this we visited right before we went to America for Christmas and they had laid our floor heating. I took a bunch of pictures for progress reports, but I accidentally wrote over the photos when we were preparing our cameras for our US trip! Sooo sad… A fellow buyer in the complex gave me a photo or two of the floor heating, but you can’t really get the picture of how all the tubes looked laid out next to each other…

It looked something like this in our flat:

(Image via Aubrey Cornfoot)

So you get an idea what the floor heating *would* have looked like… still mad I told Kay to reformat the card. Next house I’ll be more diligent!

Want to catch up?

Neubau Progress: IV

After another month rolled around, we decided to visit the flat in November to check the progress.ย 

This is the view of our new street!

There wasn’t a lot of visible progress, but the french balconies had been put up in the bedrooms along with the shutters outside.

In the kitchen you could see the tubing for all the electricity andย utilities.

Later in this very spot below, we’d find out that the builders forgot something rather big… there is a utilities shaft missing. AKA a big hole in the ground that should be there… but isn’t. But we were blissfully unaware at this point…

They had put in the tubing for our electrical outlets for the fridge, oven and sockets… but below they were still forgetting to install our extra sockets that we planned. We were not impressed. We emailed. We called. We wrote mean registered letters. They had better put our sockets in before they plaster and tile everything! Electricity setup was done ages ago and we were not impressed that after months of asking about it and being told it was being taken care of, the company STILL didn’t do anything.

And here you can at least see the green shutters from the outside. I think they make the building prettier and I’m excited that they are functional. ๐Ÿ™‚

…and the view from the train tracks.

 

Want to catch up?