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Neubau Progress: V

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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!

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Neubau Progress: IV

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

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 and 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. 🙂

…and the view from the train tracks.

 

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We have a mortgage!

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By the time March rolled around, we decided it was time to figure out our mortgage once and for all. Our list of places that work with Americans despite FATCA requirements had grown smaller compared to last year, so we only had 4 banks to choose from compared to the 30+ that most Swiss have available to them.

Still, Kay went to all of them (ZKB, UBS, CS and a local bank Linth) and told them we wanted to see some offers for either 100% Libor mortgages or 100% 5 year fixed mortgages.

Unlike the US, 20-30 year mortgages don’t really exist here. The highest model offered to people is usually a 10 year fixed mortgage. As I’ve said before, the point of your mortgage is not to pay the whole house back by then. After 10 years, you simply have to refinance your mortgage for another 1-10 years, depending on your plans. If you would secure a 10 year mortgage, it is usually not in your interest to try to “sell off” the mortgage with the house. Unless interest rates have skyrocketed, a 10 year fixed rate is usually more than what buyers would be able to find on their own for the same amount of time left on your mortgage. Buying a place with a 30 year mortgage and then selling it off? Forget about it. It doesn’t work like that here.

Since we are coming to a crossroads in about five years, we do not want to be tied to the flat longer than that. Five year fixed rates are also MUCH cheaper than 10 year fixed rates, so that’s a bonus too.

Kay went back and forth between the banks and let the bankers battle it out… we were just interested in getting the best rate possible, which we made clear from the start! It came down to a very exciting hour as Kay was calling me telling me he’d had both guys on the phone and needed to call one of them back and make a decision…. soooo, we went with the small bank!

Bank Linth bent over backwards to meet our goals and they were very excited that we promised to move all our money over to them. I am a little sad to leave English online-banking and paperwork (ugh, German paperwork… ugh!) but it will be good for me. (Hopefully.) And the advisor at Bank Linth was really the nicest out of all the people we met with.

UBS? I was really disappointed. We have almost all our money with them now and then sent this stodgy old man to talk to us. He didn’t even try offering us a first-time buyers mortgage like ZKB did. And when he heard we had better offers than him, he just said “Oh, that’s too low! We can’t do anything about it.” Not really a salesman in my eyes. I’d much rather work with a small bank and receive the care and attention we deserve. (Ok, I think we deserve it…!)

Homebuyers, did you go for a big bank or somewhere local? How did you make the choice?

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Neubau Progress: Shower vs. Bathtub

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Although our “rohbau” phase was completed, there was something small that I wanted to change. (I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal.)

Do you recall our floor plan? Check out the master bath. See how it has a bathtub? And the guest bath… it has a shower.

I’ve found this is something very common in Switzerland. Put the bathtub in the “Elternzimmer” aka parent’s bedroom and put the stall shower in the second and third bathrooms. But to me it doesn’t make any sense. If you have babies or little kids in the house, chances are you will probably want to give them a bath… in your master bathroom? Weird.

If you’re anything like Kay or me, chances are that you shower more often than you bathe, so why we would want to have a bathtub in our bathroom over a shower is beyond me. And yes, I know we can shower in a bathtub. I’m getting to the next point.

The reason why we were debating about bathtubs and showers was because there was an option for a “geflieste Dusche” or a flush tiled shower that Kay thought would be so much nicer than the standard shower basin. But it was very expensive at 6000+ CHF and I thought it was wasteful (and stupid) to spend almost half of our renovation budget on the guest bath that we will seldom use. If I was going to have a 6k shower, one that could even be longer than the standard 1m x 1m shower, then I wanted that shower to be in our master bathroom.

Double shower with no sliding door? Hell yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I wouldn’t even have to worry about mold growing as much with just a stationary glass wall to clean. We were both on board with that idea.

Above was what our guest bath looked like and below was what our master bath looked like. Practically the same and we assumed since everything was so far from being done that we could make a little change like this.

“Nope.”

That’s what our general contract manager (I don’t even know how to translate his title…) told us. The floors were already made, so we couldn’t swap the shower and the bathtub.

What?? It didn’t make any sense. Look above! Totally unfinished. Ok, almost totally unfinished. What’s the deal??

We were upset. We wrote registered letters telling our contract that we wanted to switch them and we wanted to know how much it cost. He refused. He told us that the floor was already made and there was a special box deeper cut for the shower installation. In order to have a tiled shower in the master bath we would have to have the floor redone and because the “rohbau” phase was done we were too late. Missed the boat. They were not going to drill up the floor for us. (They only do that themselves when they make big mistakes as we’ve seen…)

We were kind of pissed. I mean, it’s pretty handy that they were finished the rohbau phase as we signed for the apartment because we had a chance to step inside the real flat and see the layout, but switching the bathtub and the shower seemed like it should be so easy at this point and to be told they wouldn’t make this change was pretty frustrating.

In fact, it was around this time that we realized our GM is both stubborn and lazy. When he wasn’t on holiday, he wouldn’t read our emails until we’d call him after a week or two of waiting and all we ever heard from him was, “No.” Not, “Maybe we can work something else out…” Just “No“.

I also was insulted that the GM would ignore my emails and if Kay cc-ed me, the GM would only respond to Kay because “he’s the man” and obviously they are the only ones in a partnership making decisions… Even if Kay was on holiday in Cambodia and I was in Switzerland asking the guy to call me, he would still only direct his responses to Kay. Infuriating!

The GM seemed annoyed that we were taking time out of his coffee break to even address the shower issue and he refused to ever inquire about the cost of redoing a portion of the floor in the master bath, so ultimately after a couple months of fighting we had to give it up. In a complex with 170 flats, there’s no way to “have your way” in situations like this.

Neubau: 1, Katie and Kay: 0.

So when it came down to it, we took the bloody bathtub in the master bath and Kay agreed that we wouldn’t spend the money on a tiled shower, but that we would invest in some non-sliding doors for the shower stall.

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Travel

Weekend in Wallis

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In, gosh… 2011 (how long ago it sounds!) we received a smartbox as a wedding present that would let us stay one night in a number of fancy hotels or wellness centers in Switzerland, eastern France or northern Italy.

During the winter of 2011/12 we put off deciding when to go because we thought it would be nice to go in the summer and spend one night in the mountains camping and then another night in the hotel. Then we would really have a full weekend to utilize the long journey time by train.

When summer 2012 rolled around we finally sat down and decided which hotel we wanted to stay at but because it was really a wellness hotel with a sauna and steam room, Kay thought it sounded like more a winter activity and he wanted to wait until it was cold to go.

Well, here we are in January and the smartbox was expiring soon! Without waiting we finally booked the hotel last week and left for Mörel early Saturday morning.

Mörel is around 2.5 hours from Zürich and originally I wanted to spend two nights in the hotel, but Kay wanted to save some dough so we just planned to go early Saturday, spend the day snowshoe walking and then later enjoying the wellness center and then on Sunday we would head back.

We got to Salina Maris hotel around 9:30am. They were pretty surprised when we told them we walked up from the station. I didn’t read the reservation email thoroughly, but apparently they would have sent a driver to pick us up from the train station for free! Oh well… it was only a 10-15 minute walk up the hill.

The hotel generously let us check in early (9:30 is pretty darn early!) and rented us snowshoes and poles. We dropped our thing in the room, rearranged our backpacks for hiking and were off.

As you can kind of tell, the mountains were pretty gorgeous. When we first arrived it was really sunny and we had blue skies, but we did experience some clouds and fog throughout the walk.

Snowshoe walking is also, by the way, pretty fun. Tromping around like a little kid in the snow is great!

I ended up just wearing long underwear under my normal trekking pants. I had puffy $10 snowpants from Kohls in my backpack, but I didn’t need to use them because it was warm enough walking.

After a few hours of walking the trails, we headed back down the gondola to Mörel again and prepared ourselves for wellness time!

In the wellness area we spent several hours using the sauna for 15 minute increments, taking a rest outside, using the steam room for 10 minutes, resting and repeating. At the end we jumped in the salt pool and enjoyed the jacuzzi.

At 18:00 there was an apero for guests and we met the other guests (all Swiss) in the hotel for some white Walliser wine. Everyone at the apero was very friendly and I had a nice time trying to keep up in Swiss German.

One of the couples at the apero ended up going to the restaurant as well so we actually enjoyed our complementary three-course meal with a pair from the Biel region! It was not as “romantic” as we had planned, but I was surprised and delighted to have much such open, friendly Swiss. It is really not common to just sit down and eat dinner with complete strangers here, but they were so much fun to talk to.

The next morning we got up and enjoyed the delicious brunch before enjoying the sauna and steam room one last time. When we headed back to the train we were both extremely relaxed.

I can highly recommend the hotel rooms at Salina Maris. They are very large, have nice, clean bathrooms and even kitchnettes and fridges to use for the weekend. The ski slopes were also practically empty, in case you were looking for more reasons to go. 😉