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Neubau Progress: Bathroom

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After we signed for the flat we had to get down to business. Building was on a schedule and we needed to decide all of our customizations asap. Obviously the whole bathtub/shower switcheroo didn’t really work out like we wanted it to, but we could still change a few things in the bathrooms. We started out with drawings of the bathroom plans:

The guest bath above and the master bath below.

The architecture firm gave us a load of bathroom options online, but really we needed to head to Sanitas Troesch to “bemuster” or pick out all our customizations.

Since we couldn’t have a fancy bath, we went with the standard D-Code tub, but for the shower we upgraded the evil sliding doors to a solid glass wall on one side and a glass door on the other side. The thought was “Less moving parts, less mold”…

I was surprised again that we had to specify that we wanted a shower bar in the bathtub so that we could put the shower head high enough to shower. Um yeah, you didn’t let us swap the shower and the bathtub, but I still feel it is important to be able to actually shower in my damn master bath. Crazies.

If you’ll notice below lots of the pictures it says “kostenneutral”. This became a very common word in my German vocabulary because it means “cost neutral” and it meant those choices were included in the base price of the flat. Anything else had a price… and as we found out with the electric, everything would have a parts cost + labor + general contractor fee + builder’s tax + VAT tax on all that. Guh. But anyway, we were still going to make some changes!

It was a little scary though, because in Sanitas Troesch they gave us a million options and decisions to make and it was really easy to say “Let’s add this” here or there, not knowing what it would add up to. Some of the original picks were also no longer available because they were discontinued, so sadly sometimes we had to choose options that cost more that we didn’t even like as much (like our towel hooks, argh!)

It was nice seeing the fixtures in real life though. Kay really liked one of the more modern looking faucets that was cost neutral, but it had a very strange hinge attachment that I could foresee dirt/mold/soap scum collecting in and being a pain to clean. Everything I saw for the bathroom fixtures was being judged on my “cleanablity” scale. I do not want mold in our new flat! I convinced Kay that I didn’t want to be jamming q-tips up into the faucet handle to clean it, so we were going with the “boring” standard faucets. I think he’ll get over it.

Some bits were confusing too… Swiss have this thing about built-in soap dishes, cups, etc… that I find a bit strange, but they are in literally every house here. The sales man just sort of asked us what we wanted and where, but I kept wanting to know, “How much does that extra soap dish cost??” It was a bit stressful.

Toilets and sinks were an easy decision. We picked the prettier (rounder) cost neutral toilet. Not paying $2250 for that boxy toilet up there. And while I’m not necessarily in love with our double sink style, I also didn’t want to pay thousands to upgrade that either.

Our “chosen sink” came with a pretty naff cabinet underneath. Check that out? What is that space for?? Gathering dust? I wasn’t having that. Knowing me, I’d squish tissue boxes and bath supplies in there and it would totally ruin the clean, tidy look I’m hoping we’ll have in the bathroom. Not to mention, it would be a bitch to clean around those sinks. No, no this was not the cabinet for us.

Since we were picking everything out in as much detail as we wished, we were able to look through Sanita’s catalogue and I decided I wanted to go for a more traditional type of cabinet, while Kay was sad not to have more modern ones. The big drawers above seemed like they would be a pain to organize and I really wanted more drawers and some traditional hinge cabinets, so we came up with the option below. I just wanted everything to be practical!

But after we signed for everything, Sanitas came back and told us the cabinets above would be impossible with our double sink because the drawers would run into the faucets in the middle. We could change it slightly and put drawers in the middle and cabinets on the outside or all flat cabinets, but it ruined my idea of splitting up drawers between Kay and myself, so we said “screw it” and went with the original giant drawer below:

And honestly, I can’t really remember if it is the one above or if it will really have two drawers… the decision came after the bathroom contract and it’s been so long since we decided everything that I’m afraid when we check the finished flat, we’ll have forgotten what we even chose if we don’t have the proper documentation for it. I’m only left with the plans that still include the cabinet and drawer combo above. (Things like this keep me up at night…)

For the half bath, we were surprised to learn that it didn’t come with an under sink cabinet at all. That just wouldn’t do. I mean, I plan on putting toilet paper and crap for guests under there. And tampons. You know, IMPORTANT stuff.

We went with a simple two door cabinet because they don’t make the gianormous drawer cabinets in this width. I am happy.

I am even happy with our giant drawer. I was unsure how I felt about it when we first decided everything, but now I think it will be nice an streamlined and hopefully not too hard to organize…

Along with the master bath and guest bath we were surprised to learn this was when we had to pick out our basement cellar sink for the wash room. A small dinky sink came with the flat price, but we upgraded it a tad (at least I think we did…!) bigger sink. Kay convinced me that we don’t need a crazy laundry sink with ridges for scrubbing, because let’s be honest… how often do I hand wash things?

After a few rounds, all the bathrooms were sorted and we were on to bigger, bolder decisions.

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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. 😉

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Neubau Progress: I

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I should have shared all these pictures a while ago, but I’ve taken my sweet time doing it. I mean, I was busy writing weddingbee recaps when I took these last March!

We cheated a little during our first inspection and just went to some other flats in the same row that already had the wooden beams taken down so that we could get an idea of the true height of the ceiling.

I was standing next to the kitchen entrance on the left, the hallway to the door was to the right and closer in the foreground to the right is the hallway to the bathroom/bedroom. If you notice, this particular flat doesn’t have the built in wardrobes behind that big concrete pillar on the right. The plan would look like this without the built in wardrobe:

Was that big block with all the wiring really necessary to put there in the middle instead of by one of the side walls or up inside the réduit? If that could be somewhere else, there would have been a lot more layout possibilities with the flat. I mean, yeah it’s sort of a handy donut hole for wiring (there are other holes in the kitchen and the bathrooms) but I feel like they could have planned it a little better. The thing about hallways here is that you really pay a premium for that extra floorspace, but you can’t utilize the space for tables or sofas. It’s more “walking area” than “living area”.

Taking away the built in wardrobes does open up the space a lot, but to store coats, shoes and other things you would have to buy or build some storage next to the door. We never had a coat closet in either of the flats we’ve lived in together and I’ve never had one in the flat I lived in alone, so we are both looking forward to having a place to store all our winter and summer coats. Between the two of us we really have a lot of ski jackets, trekking jackets, etc, and now they are all piled up on a poor coat stand by the door and half are shoved under the attic roof in the laundry area.

Second bedroom. Those floor to ceiling windows will be nice!

Looking out our bedroom windows.

Standing in the master bath where the tub will eventually be. I’m obviously really excited about showering here someday. Kay thought the master bath is small, but I think it looks huge, don’t you?

Another view from the living room into the kitchen.

When we viewed the flat without the wooden beams up, Kay still thought it looked overall small, but I was happy with the size. I seem to have better spacial skills (whereas he wins with directional skills) and I was happy with how large it is. The bedrooms are not enormous, but the living room is huge for us and the kitchen will be a big upgrade.

Theoretically we could  have a baby here if forced to and it should be large enough that we can set up some kind of guest room. This makes it OK in my book!

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No Mortgages for Americans? Signing the Contract

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While many neubau owners have to make large payments throughout the building process that require them to take early mortgages, our company offered us a simple and attractive purchasing plan in three steps:

  1. 30k Reservation fee
  2. 15% Sale price due when the contract is signed (minus reservation fee)
  3. 85% Sale price due when keys are handed over

After we visited the flat and decided we really wanted it, we paid the reservation fee and in theory, we were given a week to sign the contract.

The contract took forever to arrive though, and when it did we took it to VermögensZentrum in Zürich to have it reviewed by professionals. VZ gave us some helpful tips of things we should have changed or clarified and we had the contractor make the changes for us to sign.

There were some scary tidbits in the contract that we couldn’t change due to the fact that I am not Swiss (which I’ll mention later), but overall everything looked good. However it took ages for the contractor to remember to include the motorcycle parking space that Kay wanted for his bike so we kept waiting.

Kay was also in Cambodia for a month traveling, so much of the back and forth about the contract was done by email in German. It was pretty frustrating at times if I didn’t understand something and Kay was hard to contact. I met him in Singapore for holiday and it was there that we had our first big scare about buying because I am American.

While VZ ist not a bank, they also offer mortgages and they notified us that while we were qualified to buy the flat, they no longer offer mortgages to Americans due to the new implications FATCA brings to financial institutions outside the US. They were warning us that it might not be possible to buy unless we came up with an additional 160,000CHF so Kay could buy the flat by himself. Riiight. Like we have that kind of money laying around…

“Whatever!”, I thought. We were already pre-approved for a mortgage with Axa-Winterthur, so we are fine.

Kay was nervous though. So when I got back from Singapore, he had me contact Axa to see if they would still accept us even though it had only been a month since I’d met with them. But sure enough, when I contacted our insurance representative again, he told me,

“I’m sorry, but three weeks ago we changed our policy. Axa-Winterthur is no longer accepting Americans for mortgages.”

SHIT.

I started contacting other banks and insurance companies about their mortgage offers. No, no, no.

When Raiffeisen told me over the phone that they aren’t accepting American customers, I felt my stomach sink further than it has in years. This is not something about myself I can “fix”. I am American and I am only American. I do not have another citizenship, nor can I toss aside my only citizenship to free myself from these prejudices.

It was a sobering experience. Ten of the fifteen banks I contacted told me they flat out do not accept Americans anymore. I’ll write you all the reasons why I loathe FATCA later, but I understand the viewpoint of the Swiss institutions. It is a PIA for them to fill out paperwork for the IRS just because their customer is American. The IRS’s filing requirements for Americans living and working abroad are unfair for everyone involved, so many places here are taking the decision to simply avoid working with Americans.

It left a hard decision for us though. Kay had come home from traveling in April. The flat we reserved would not be ready for over a year and we had no idea which banks would say “yes” or “no” to Americans by the time we need to pay step #3.

Would we risk committing to buy a flat and not being able to finance it later because we are rejected for mortgages based on my citizenship?

Hell yes, we did!

We had around 5 banks that said they still accepted Americans, so it’s not like we couldn’t get a mortgage. We even had another big bank pre-approve us again before we bought and we were moderately happy with the terms. The risk is that we might not have the best mortgage offers available to Swiss and non-Americans, but that’s a risk we were willing to take in order to buy.

Have you read up about FATCA yet? It’s really not well thought out. But more on that later.

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