Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Lights? We don't need no stinkin' lights. Now with an Update

Swiss apartments - rental apartments, mind you - do not, as a rule, come with lights. No ceiling fixtures, not even of the cheapest kind. (They also generally do not come with window treatments of any kind, hence Small Boy possesses the only room in our apartment with actual curtains.) They do come with electricity and sockets but you, my friend, must buy floor lamps and/or mount the ceiling fixtures yourself. So in an effort at some trans-Atlantic yeah-we-could-improve-on-this-but-we-are-teh-lazy-and/or-cheap solidarity with Phantom, may I present our office light:



And our hallway light:



And the light in our guest room:



Our dining room, however, rocks:



And Small Boy has the best lighting in the apartment:



It wouldn't be that big a deal to change these things, but it's just sooooo low on the never-ending list of priorities, you know?

But it's terribly un-Swiss.

UPDATE: To add insult to ugliness, the bulb in the office just blew!

11 Comments:

At 16:32 , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Those are excellent.

So do they teach light installation in Swiss schools? That's a skill I certainly could have used.

 
At 16:59 , Anonymous Anonymous said...

:-) Very unswiss AGAIN lol those lights are awful.. (except for the obviously lovely ones...)

 
At 20:17 , Blogger J said...

Do they come with kitchens? German apts don't.

 
At 21:55 , Blogger Berlinbound said...

Un-Swiss is not a bad thing!

 
At 03:13 , Blogger junebee said...

How about table lamps, can you get them in Switzerland?

 
At 13:03 , Blogger swissmiss said...

Phantom - R can do a lot of this stuff because farmer training includes all sorts of tools and wiring, but how the average person does this without ruining hte ceiling is beyond me.

Lillian - If the Schweizermachers were still in business I'd so never get a Swiss passport!

J - you have to buy your own fridge and stuff? really? no, at least we get those standard.

Richard - it's one thing for me to be un-Swiss, but R is getting less and less Swiss over time. It's strange.

Junebee - table lamps aren't very common but you can get them at IKEA, but nobody uses them except maybe next to the bed. Floor lamps are the big thing (because nobody wants to put in ceiling lights, probably!)

 
At 19:03 , Blogger Writer and Nomad said...

yes, terrible lights there. but i can understand the priorities man. there are just a million other things to be bothered with.

 
At 20:53 , Blogger J said...

swissmiss, fridge, sink, oven - EVERYTHING. Quite inconvenient for an American, but Germans think it's great.

 
At 18:18 , Blogger christina said...

Very functional. :-)

 
At 18:06 , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Really? No lights? That's bizarre. Do you at least get a washing machine?

 
At 20:23 , Blogger swissmiss said...

Christina - we're all about the functional around here.

Kinuk - Welcome! We have a washer/dryer in our apartemtn but they are by no means standard. Many people have a laundry room for the buiding, and then the Swiss thing to do is to have an assigned laundry day and time. Yeah. Very happy we have our own!

 

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