Today I signed the lease for the apartment. Yay! Below are some reasons why this is a monumental victory for me:
- I will be out of town in Zurich from today until Sept 30th, which meant everything had to be done before I left. That gave me yesterday and today to get everything organized. It’s especially difficult to organize things when you aren’t quite sure what all you need to do.
- In order to sign a lease in Switzerland, you have to have three months of rent blocked in your bank account. Since they pay employees once per month here, I did not have any money in my new Swiss account. I found this out yesterday morning. Unfortunately, I found this out at 2am Seattle time, and to initiate a wire online the bank sends you an authorization code… to your cell phone. Since I no longer have my cell phone, that wouldn’t work. To make a long story short, I ended up borrowing $5000 in cash from Britney.
- I then made an appointment with my bank for this morning to get the letter. This took over an hour to get everything together. Then I went straight to the rental agency to sign all of the paperwork. I’m pretty sure I wrote less signatures when applying for our mortgage.
- I also had to get renters insurance before signing the lease. The agency I’m working with gave me a name of someone, so I got everything I needed from him yesterday too. He asked me if the building caught fire and everything inside was completely destroyed how much the replacement cost would be. As I was adding everything up in my head, he mentioned that the minimum coverage policy is for $20k. I laughed and told him that would be plenty.
- I had to move out of my temporary apartment today and clean everything last night. I had to wash the dishtowels I had been using, so I reluctantly headed downstairs to the washing machine. Other than answering the phone at work, laundry makes me the most nervous. I put in a load of towels, loaded the soap, closed the door, and then couldn’t get anything to work. I pressed every single button on the machine, including the “open door” button several times, and nothing happened. My towels were hostage. I was down there for a while by myself, but since someone else had clothes in the dryer, I figured they would have to come down eventually to help me. After about 20 minutes, however, I decided to wait up by the front door, since there had to be someone coming home. The first guy who walked in was about my age and looked terrified when I tried to talk to him. He was wearing a nice little sweater and glasses and was clearly an introvert. When I asked him in French if he lived in the building, he said in a small English voice that he doesn’t speak French. Lucky for him, I’m pretty good at English! He came downstairs with me, and apparently you need a special key to start… or unlock… the washer. He told me this then started walking out the door. I begged him to please get his key so I could get my stuff out. I was about 50/50 that he wouldn’t actually come back, but he did, and I grabbed my dirty towels and ran back upstairs. I hand washed all of them at about 11pm last night.
- Then the TV broke in the apartment. I had turned it on for 10 minutes to listen to one last music video as I got ready for bed, heard a ‘pop’, and it died. I’m really excited to replace a TV in an apartment I barely lived in that I will never see again.
- I also had to move all of my stuff back to the office. This was a three day long process as I brought bags each time I went into work this week. Sweating on my way to work is one of my favorite things.
I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I'm going to call this overall a success. I get the keys next Friday, and then my air mattress and I will have a home.
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