It has been a while since I wrote last time about the new apartment in China. It has been too long as over half-year passed by already. Back then I had the news that MIL will move into the new apartment alone and FIL would stay behind the old place and have his peace from his wife. This actually did not change thus far and that is something special as my in-laws are changing their plans as often as other people change their clothes.
Renovating the apartment has finally started and MIL might be able to move in by May/ June. It took ages for them to decide how the apartment should look like, which materials to use and what furniture to purchase but after nearly a year of discussion and useless ideas they settled on something. Now I have no clue at all how it will look like but something has been bothering me a lot. Apparently renovating that 90m²/ ~970ft² apartment (actually more like 80m² as in China there is some stupidity going on that you purchase part of the staircase/ floor outside the apartment) takes over three whole months! How on earth can this be possible? Sure the apartment is just a shell when they purchased it without any floor, just concrete wall and windows. But how can this take that long?
Here in Germany when you build a house most companies guarantee that the entire house is complete after 3 months including everything inside according to your wishes. So how can just a small apartment take that long in China. Besides taking way too long it also costs pretty much the same as it would in Germany. For example in 2017 I renovated a 70m² apartment together with my dad in just four weeks so how can it be that professionals need three times as long? In my opinion something fishy is going on as it seems to be the norm in China that it takes so many months and worst they say the apartment needs to “air” for a couple of months so all the fumes are more or less gone by then. I am no expert but I have renovated enough apartments by now that I know that there is something very wrong and that they just want to charge more for taking that long.
I would love to show some pictures of the current progress but sadly my in-laws never took any pictures or videos. Most likely the next pictures of that apartment will be in April when we visit it ourselves. I do wonder how long it will take for MIL to ruin the apartment as three months each year in our apartment are enough to destroy or damage rather much. Probably FIL will go there very often to clean up the mess due to his OCD but I hope it won’t be that often as I wish for him to get some rest and perhaps his hairs might even grow back with less stress around the household.
What are your experiences on how long it takes to renovate an apartment?
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Crazy Chinese Family 