Bought a house

Bought a house
Posted by Michael Slater under Uncategorized , House

Tuesday is May Day holiday in Singapore. Our first item of the day was to check out a house that a family friend knew about. We liked the layout and decided it had potential. We bought it an hour later. haha

The Background
I’m quite satisfied that we got a good price. At worst I paid market value for it, but I think I paid closer to bid-side. It helped that the seller was being very lazy about marketing it, especially by not using an agent. Ling’s friend basically went as the go-between aunty for us and got them to improve their offer. We would have lifted the starting offer anyway. So the $20,000 price cut she got for us is free-money. In six months I can look back at all the 2007 sales telemetry and see how I did versus the rest of the market.
It’s a 20yo freehold (as opposed to a 99-year leasehold) 2-storey semi-detached house. (Semi-detached is Singapore nomenclature for a house that shares one wall with another house. I guess USA would call it a duplex, but it doesn’t hold the same gross, low-end implications ‘duplex’ does. I’m not living in Plum Boro) The land plot is 4,900 square feet. Built-in area (living space) is around 3,500ish sq ft. Four bedrooms and quite a huge living area downstairs.

The house is very sound. The estate was constructed by a builder who ultimately went bankrupt because they built their properties too well, while successful developers, like the infamous Far East, flourish by building flash-looking rubbish. I know it’s rubbish because I’ve lived in two Far East units myself.
The outside architecture is, well frankly, weird. All the houses have some strange structural pier/shoulder to them. I think it makes them look like a sleeping At-At, but inside the rooms are very large and have very high ceilings. And I can’t feel embarassed, because the neighbors’ houses look the same way.
One of my favorite things about the house is its location on the immediate border of the Nee Soon Swamp Forest (what anyone else would call a military training jungle). That means lots of terrific hikes and play with the boy and the dogs. It’s also close enough to smell the marvelous morning smell-of-the-jungle. There is an open field nearby with a lot of birdwatchers.

The Plan

The plan is to renovate the place, but the layout and construction is already good, so it means no massive teardowns or anything.

The heaviest thing I’ll do is build a very big, very high-end kitchen. I’ve mentally budgeted a lot of money to the kitchen. Most of the other stuff is comparatively simple.
Brainstorming the one will be plenty of fun. I’m waiting for RogerWarez to start del.icio.us’g me links for all sorts of over-the-top high-tech kitchen appliances, phase-plasma ovens, mitochondrial-fermentation vessels, and hologramatic sharpeners for fractal-knives, etc. My intention is to find out who the top-of-class kitchen interior guys are in Singapore and set them loose.

The other rooms are basically ok. Ling is in charge of getting the master bedroom arranged to her specs. She wants a large walk-in closet, etc. Boring girl-stuff anyway.

My only suggestion for the master bedroom concerned the entrance. The master’s room is slightly higher than the landing and the other two bedrooms. To get to it, the hallway is a short bridge that crosses an airwell. My suggestion was to convert the fixed bridgelet into a draw bridge. Sort of a “when the bridge is a raisin’ don’t come a knockin’” I got an Elmore Leonard stare for that one.

We’re going to get it set up for an outdoor eating area. As well as change the disgusting front door/window regime. Replace it with french doors is my guess, but that’s crap for the architect to suggest.

Other more amusing stuff? Finally ought to be able to install a permanent, solid, high ham radio antenna. Would like to have a sound system in the house that can query my central server full of mp3s and play them locally in rooms. Would like to have a proper herb/vegetable gardenlet. We’ve always talked about having a real safe, not a 30-minute fire-toy. Need somewhere to keep our money belts and small arms.
I met the owners tonight, when I paid them 1% for an option to buy the house. He told me they had considered to make the attic into play area for their five kids. However when he went up there, the roof was full of solid steel trusses, so he didn’t want to mess with it. Not sure if I will bother to try to turn it into some sort of storage area.

Not sure when this all gets resolved. Frequently the escrow process takes three months. Hopefulyl it will be faster. I will talk to a lawyer tomorrow for my side of things, but the basic process is I pay 1% now for an option to buy the place, which requires me to pay another 9% in 14 days and then I’ll pay the balance at some point after that. I suppose after the title searches, etc are done. Not sure what the delay would be for three months. The people don’t live there anyway.

Oh well, at least there will be a new subject to blog about. It’s either that or discuss our soon-to-be-terminated maid. We’re quite sick of her sloth and indifference. Ling found a Burmese maid from Myanamar who’ll start in two weeks. Apparently she speaks mandarin (father is Chinese). I don’t know if that means she’s a Burmese from the Golden Triangle or what, but it will be good for the boy to have someone speak to him solely in Mandarin, although I guess it might give him an odd accent.

(The reason we’re waiting two weeks to dump the current maid is that Matt is coming on Friday. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’ll be playing the role of our household Alec Baldwin, “in from downtown… sent by Mitch and Murray… on a mission-of-mercy.” Except first prize is “you’re fired” too. )