Tags
Bank, basins, baths, Buy home, demolition, Dishwashers, doors, Home, House, interior designer, Israel, Kitchen, lawyer, legal, Mortgage, plumbing, property, renovation contract, Shopping, sinks, taps, tax, tiles
Time for an update…quite a big one actually…
We will start with the most stressful stuff ie mortgage.
The bank is blaming the seller’s lawyer for all the trouble and the lawyers are blaming the bank. We are stuck in the middle and running out of time. We (possibly) have found a solution to the current stalemate. All the seller’s documents are ready and completed with one minor correction that needs to be approved. Our lawyer is sending a courier – at our cost of course (only 250 NIS) – to the land registry office in Bet-El to obtain the last document we need which was sent a week ago but had not yet arrived as of yesterday. The lawyer will hopefully receive this on Sunday and take all the documents over to the bank which is only 5 mins walk away from their office. There is therefore still a small chance that we could get the mortgage in time…..we will see next week.
Design – not finalised but basically unchanged. We have confirmed with Tamar which windows we will be enlarging and she has arranged a meeting with the Iriya in 10 days time to discussed what we need to do to get these minor changes to the outside of the house approved.
Shopping – Adam went shopping last week with Tamar at Bar-Ami and they mainly looked at tiles and bathroom/plumbing. This gave us a shortlist of a few designs to choose from and we made a lot of progress. Today we both met with Tamar at a shop in Tel Aviv (Sharoni) and made lots of decisions. We have decided on tiles, the main themes are wood in the style of American walnut and a natural stone tile which is a greyish colour with a brown streak, tying it in with the wood theme. We have also chosen our toilets, bathroom taps, most of the shower heads and internal fittings, kids bath, most of the basins, kitchen sinks, and we even started discussing doors – we had a productive morning 🙂 We still have to decide on kitchen taps, our bath and a basin for the guest toilet.
On the doors – we have a basic design that we would like for the front door, we need to confirm if it is do-able (the company makes all their doors to order, and gives a 10 year money back warranty in the event of burglary with the door as the point of entry). Although we haven’t really started talking about internal doors, we put forward the option that the inside of the kids’ doors be a blackboard or whiteboard and we have been told that this company can do this – Both Tamar and the salesman liked the idea, we should ask for a commission…
We have all arranged to meet up again in 2 weeks but before this Tamar and Adam will meet to start on the kitchen cabinets and maybe windows and patio decking.
Let’s move on to the oven as we are talking about the kitchen…
Adam went to La Cucina in Tel Aviv which is the Ilve importer. He has decided on a 100 cm oven as the 120 is a bit too big. It will have 2 ovens – a 60 cm and 40 cm. The hob will probably have 6 rings, or 4 rings and a built-in griddle. It will be stainless steel to match the sinks. Joelle will look at it in 2 weeks time to confirm if she agrees. They are fairly expensive but cheaper than any other quality option sold in Israel, and with no extra shipping costs.
Dishwashers – since the non arrival and therefore cancellation of the dishwasher order before Pesach there is still no progress to report. It is very difficult to find the time right now to move on and talk to suppliers. We did finally get our money back after several phone calls to Best Buy.
Contractors – since the last update a third contractor has been round the house and we now have quotes in for all 3 of them for the demolition. We need to now make a decision about who to use, and will be talking to Tamar about this next week.
Regarding the actual property – The final tenants moved out a few days ago so the house is now empty and the garden is full of all the garbage. This is an improvement on how it was before. We hope the seller gets rid of the garbage before we get the keys which should be this coming Thursday…..
If not our lawyer will sort it out as according to the contract the house will be empty.
In case you didn’t notice the subtle comment above, I will repeat – the house will be ours in 6 more days 🙂
As we have moved on to ownership of the property – we spoke to the Iriya and now have a form to fill in that will give a 50% discount on arnona while the property is empty/being renovated.
6 days and counting down (our backwards counting of the omer)
Adam & Joelle.
