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Tricky Swiss Realty Ads

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As an expat in Switzerland, navigating the realty here can be intimidating in the beginning. It is easy to feel confused when searching through listings in German.

After living here for several years and searching for both rentals and houses for sale, I have noticed a couple points about the listing titles. Here are a few rough translations to explain.

This means that the apartment is really pretty small, but supposedly “nice”. Often you can find nice little luxury apartments or well kept spaces, but in general “Klein aber fein” means overpriced for how small it is.

I would definitely use this term to describe our $3000 a month one bedroom. It was beautiful and well-equipped and the view and luxury are worth it to some, but in our case I was ready to move on.

This generally means the house is in poor or terrible condition, but you can renovate it if you have the stomach for Swiss labor costs.

They are not always awful and sometimes you can find a great deal on a nice forever house, but most of the time they are so outdated or in bad repair that you wonder how people live in them.

Once I saw a house with a bathroom (bathtub and toilet) in the kitchen – a throwback to the olden days when the kitchen was the only room in the house with water pipes. But I don’t need a toilet in my food prep space, thank you.

Kay didn’t want to look at anything with Ausbaupotential because we were not planning on getting involved with any renovation projects at the moment. Or maybe ever. I don’t see Kay ever being that keen on self renovation or an old house.

This basically means that the place is overpriced and probably not affordable for you. Unless you happen to earn over a million a year or have several millions saved up in your account for the deposit, just look away.

Don’t spend too much time ogling luxury villas like I do.

Unlike “Toplage” listings, it’s usually a good thing when a listing is right on top of a public transportation stop. You will pay more money to be next to a train station. Prices go down if you are only next to a tram, even less for buses and if the listing requires a car to get to and from work, it had better be darn well cheap!

Those are just a few of the common listing terms I saw when I was searching to buy our home. If you are looking up rentals you need to watch out for three important things:

  1. “möblierte” apartments are furnished. Watch out if you are not looking for a furnished flat. There are plenty of them around.
  2. “WG” which stands for “Wohngemeinschaft” and means a shared flat. If you found a great price (1200CHF) on a four bedroom in downtown Zürich, it probably means that is the price for one of the rooms, not the whole flat.
  3. “Befristet” apartments. Chances are that flat is a great price because it is either being subleased for a limited period or it is due for a renovation. Either way, the leases on temporary apartments are usually 1-11 months. That can be good if you are looking for a temporary solution, but don’t fall in love and move into a flat that you’ll have to move out of in a couple months.

Do you notice any common listing terms on the realty around you?

Holiday

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

It’s normally impossible to cook a turkey dinner on a work day in Switzerland, so for the first time ever I am actually going out to dinner to celebrate.

Fork and Bottle is holding a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings, although the potatoes are colcannon, which is a little blasphemous… At 75CHF excluding drinks it’s a little pricey, but I’m really looking forward to eating and merriment with friends, which is what this day is all about.

Without my family around to celebrate, it is nice to find some time here to be grateful for all the good things I have going on in my life and cherish those around.

Those in the States, hug your loved ones extra tight for me and have a slice of pie!

How are you celebrating today?

(Image via Fork and Bottle)

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Swiss Wardrobe Quotation (Eeek!)

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Whelp, after I sketched up those wardrobe ideas, we received the offers from Dogern. They are so professional they also give you some simple renderings, which easily impresses me.

If you’ve forgotten, here is our bedroom floor plan. Our floor is darker of course. Two windows on the top wall, the bathroom door on the upper right wall and the door to the rest of the flat on the bottom wall.

We plan to make just one wardrobe now and possibly (depending on cost) supplement with a dresser or two on the other walls.

Frameless Doors:

These Noteborn doors are so nice. The frameless adds a very elegant touch and makes the whole wardrobe blend seamlessly into the wall. They are our favourites, but we weren’t looking forward to finding out the price.

Matrix Doors:

The Matrix doors are a little more clunky and have a frame running around each individual door, so if we choose white doors to match the walls, the doors will be broken up by the lines of the frames in each section.

Option 1:

The idea of option one is to save money on those expensive, expensive drawers and just go for hanging space and using drawers where we can’t fit any more space. The reason why I haven’t made it completely hanging space is that Kay’s clothes (shirts and pants) are all fairly longer than mine, so on his side (on the right) it’s not quite long enough for three rows of shirts and pants to fit. On my side (the left) I think I can squeeze one more row in for maximum capacity!

Option 2:

On this version we stick drawers in each section. It cuts down on the hanging space but in general should be as much or more space than we had with our old wardrobes in Zürich. And we have lots of drawer space for pullovers and pants and things.

Again I made Kay’s section (this time on the left) have more space for larger/longer clothes and on my side (this time in the middle) I put extra drawers in.

Prices:

  • Option 1 with Matrix doors: 7225CHF ($7871)
  • Option 1 with Frameless doors: 9458CHF ($10,304)
  • Option 2 with Matrix doors: 10049CHF ($10,948)
  • Option 2 with Frameless doors: 12420 ($13,523)

Yes, yes those are some crazy prices. But I’m afraid we’ve looked at almost every custom wardrobe place along the border in Germany and in Switzerland and this is way cheaper than a lot of other offers out there. It would have cost 20,000 or so to do two wardrobes, which is why we are either doing one or supplementing with dressers.

It costs an extra 2300CHF ($2500) or so to get the frameless doors, so as much as we love them… no. I just can’t. Not for a non-forever home at this point in our lives. It would add to the value of the house, but we really don’t have the money right now and I don’t want to live most of the time here with nothing just so we can get something nice for a year or two before we leave. That’s not smart!

As for the price difference between having tons of drawers or going for the supplemental dresser route, we are debating whether it’s worth it to save 2824CHF ($3076) and use some of that money to buy a dresser or two and have more storage. We would just need to find some dressers we like, which isn’t so easy in Switzerland!

Were you ever surprised how expensive it is to do something custom in your house?

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Grimey Floors

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Our second and last repair day for our flat was last Friday finally. Kay worked from home again and let in the repair men, who already started coming by 7:30 when I was eating my breakfast.

We had a couple things repaired in the bathroom, including the grey grout crosses around the holes for the towel holders! Woot woot. And we also finally had the parquet guy come to repair some damages on the wood floor we noticed during our inspection.

When I came home from work, the hallway with the damages from the workers was repaired but also looked so new and fancy… I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Once we moved in, we actually doubted if the smoked oak was a good choice, because to be honest, it has just looked dusty and gross since we moved in despite vacuuming and washing. But the floor the guy repaired looks pretty good!

He told us that our floors need oiled, like… badly. They are not supposed to look as dull and washed out as they do now.

See below is another spot in the living room that he repaired and he just oiled the repair patch. Look at that difference!

Here you can see how bad our floors actually look at the moment, but I am hoping we can oil them up soon and they’ll be much better!

The worker also repaired a couple defects below the table, but I’m not totally happy with how they turned out. And you can totes see that our IKEA dining table is wearing a little thin. I need to touch up the parts that are wearing away!

So basically I feel kind of like a dummy… we just thought we have brand new floors and this is how they should be. I’m really hoping that oiling will fix our problem because I feel like I constantly have to clean the floors if anyone walks anywhere.

Do you have hardwood floors? Are they varnished or oiled?

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Organizing the Flat

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Boy does it take awhile to get settled in a new place!

I think it usually helps if you actually own all the furniture you have before you move (we need to buy a lot of storage shelving and wardrobes) and you know, if your bathroom isn’t rendered inhabitable right after you move in. Still, somewhere between holding up all those awnings (God, my arms!!) I managed to start unpacking.

Since we finished moving earlier than planned, we went ahead and bought two super  tall bookshelves to start organizing our office. The rooms are so tall that we can actually fit two additional shelves on top of the highest Billy model, making the bookshelves about 280cm or 9’18” tall.

Thank goodness I still had all my plastic bins from our built-in-bookshelves in Zürich!

We also had that orange sofa bed up there delivered fairly soon after moving in, but the guy was totally weird and gave us a sofa with the wrong feet, so it didn’t sit properly on the ground. And it was pretty gross so I wanted to strip the covers and wash them pronto, but it took a good week before the room was clear enough to take the cover off.

Down in the basement, we had this:

It honestly doesn’t look much better now because we still don’t have shelves down there, but we threw away the broken bed frame and some boxes and Styrofoam, so that helped a little. Kay will get his bike out of there as soon as he finds his bike lock and stores it in the bike room in the garage.

By the entrance to the cellar is our little wash area with a laundry tower on one side and a sink on the other side.

The cellar is a decent enough size, definitely bigger than what we had in Zürich, and since it’s tall we will eventually be able to utilize shelving to clear everything up, but for now it’s a little chaotic.

We also bought that dehumidifier you see because we spotted a little dampness on our back wall during inspection and we don’t want any mold problems. The building is still so new that the concrete walls are quite moist, so we will leave the dehumidifier on for quite awhile. In fact, before we bought the hose for it to drain directly, we had to empty the 20L container every morning and evening. Without it, it’s roughly 70% humidity down there… and with the dehumidifier it’s keeping it around 45%. Maybe that’s keeping it a bit dry for summer months, but since the walls keep oozing out humidity, we just want to soak that up before problems start.

The home inspector also recommended keeping our things away from the walls for quite awhile. (I forget how long of course) so when we get shelves, we’ll probably set them up in the middle of the room to start with.

Now, here are those weird stubby legs that came with the sofa bed. They are not from the Karlstad series and when attached to the sofa bed, the sofa just sat on the sofa bed parts and not the legs. It was pretty random. We pulled them off and stuck them on our normal 3 seater Karlstad until we buy metal legs for the living room sofas.

The sofa is also noticeably shorter with these legs, but at least with the old square legs we could set the sofa bed on its feet and start taking the covers off to be washed.

So that’s what’s going on with the house at the moment. Baby steps as we acquire more storage room. Our flat in Zürich sure did have a lot built in with the laundry room and the attic storage!