Hello,

My landlord (who also lives in the same building) is planning to do some renovation work to the outside of the building. This will last 3 months and the whole place will be covered with scaffolding. They have informed us that during the day it will be noisy and dusty.

Does anyone know what my rights are here? Are we entitled to some discount in the rent for the duration? They have offered a reduction that amounts to 5% of my rent, which to be honest feels like so little I would have felt happier if they offered nothing at all.

Thanks for any help.

What you are entitled to depends strongly on the amount of disturbance you experience. Hard to say from here what you should get as compensation.

I'm not sure you are due anything, to be honest. We had windows and the facade replaced a few years ago, also with floor to roof scaffolding, dust, noise, etc., but our day-to-day living wasn't affected (i.e. we still had use of the bathroom, kitchen, washing facilities, etc.)

They only worked between 7 and 16H, Monday to Friday and the really noisy stuff only happened after 8.30-ish when we were all at work/school. Still a bit spooky living on the upper floors and some bloke in a hardhat walks past your kitchen window when you're making a cup of tea...

Best advice - make sure you're dressed before they arrive.

Join the local branch of ASLOCA (tenants association), you'll find them in the telephone book or on google.
They're best placed to advice you of your rights for this and any other issues that might arise from being a tenant in Switzerland.

Realistically, you're probably entitled to a reduction in rent for the duration of the work, but it won't be much as it seems to be fairly minor exterior work rather than anything more disruptive.

Also; if there are other renters in the building ask them what they're thinking/doing about this.
A group action is always more effective than going solo, just bear in mind that the owner might decide to not renew your tenancy when it become due. Another reason for having the backing of ASLOCA if that happens.

Landlord may be able to increase rent, especially if new windows fitted once it's finished.

Thanks, They are replacing the roof and repainting the whole building, I will consider joining ASLOCA, seems like it might be the best option.

I was told in another country that you need to inform your insurance (content) if there is a scaffolding like that on the building. Not sure how informing them helps if someone breaks in....

Hi this is quite unhelpful and unnecessarily patronising, a search on this site with those words does not bring any results and clearly a Google search with that will bring German language web pages, which is obviously useless to me, as if I could read German I would not need this forum.

Since my partner works for home the disturbance will be quite substantial actually, maybe this will be helpful!

There's a reasonable translation tool called DeepL, which can help translate big swathes of documents. Mullhollander is pretty good with info on here and often comes up trumps with helpful stuff.

You're reading more hostility into the post than there is. If you want to know the laws/regulations about things here, those are going to mostly be in German, French, or Italian. It's helpful to know what the German term is so you can find the right thing when you search.

They painted our building last fall and we didn't get any discount, so I guess 5% is better than what we got. We didn't bother to contact mieterverband/ASLOCA for that and we didn't find it too disruptive except we couldn't use the balcony for about a month.

Edit - Oops, I see you're in Lausanne. I guess you'd need to know the French term.

https://www.mieterverband.ch/dam/jcr...entscheide.pdf

Lists 10% in case of
"Facade renovation, elevator construction and other heavy construction work which disturb tenants (associated with noise, dust, scaffolding, power interruption, withdrawal of balcony, etc.)"

As you know, our only purpose here is to satisfy your demands for information without question or hesitation.

Wow, I never knew that there was a purpose here!

Or did you mean porpoise?

Tom

No he means poutine.

So this is all the fault of the Russians?

Tom