Apartment hunting in Singapore; part 1

After a beer fest in any country, no one wants to get up at 09.00 to look at apartments. You don’t want to wait for additional people to join in who are also late and you don’t want to meet crazy women who speak like chip-monks in high pitching voices telling you about how they lose their hair because of stress, SHOWING you their bald scalps, telling you that this will also happen to you. Neither do you want anyone to have the Nokia signal ‘da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da-daaaa’ on the highest possible volume, ringing every 30th second without the person picking up, since she’s too busy telling you where you should work, how you should live your life and that you should feel happy when you see one shitty apartment after another. If this happens to you, you just want to get out of the car and punch them in the face; fortunately both me and Jonas could keep ourselves in some sort of poise, but we did tell the person that we seriously needed to dump miss Baldy asap or else. At that point Jonas could no longer speak, besides one look and ‘for anda in I helvetet, ta mig harifran (for fuck sakes, get me out of here)’ and we left for another viewing. We then saw a fantastic apartment, with a really nice pool and BBQ pit on the roof, but since the Nokia-maniac had insisted we’d seen at least 3 of her shit holes, another tenant had been able to sign up on it as we were walking in. Not the best way to start the search.
We returned to the hotel completely exhausted, had picked up food on the way and just fell asleep until the next appointment with the second agent at 16.00. Since we don’t have a car, I’d told all the 12 (!) agents who’d contacted us that they needed to pick us up at the hotel entrance and drive us to the apartments. That turned out to be very good and at exactly 15.58 a calm, timid, casually dressed guy in his 40’s presented himself as Kendric and showed us to his AC:ed, nice ride and took us to the coolest apartment I’ve ever seen.

One pic from the roof top pool

It was a 2-floor penthouse, completely newly built; with two bathrooms, two balconies and the roof was one big pool with a BBQ island in the middle. Everything was glass and steel and each apartment had its own private Jacuzzi adjacent to the main big pool. All details were futuristically designed and I just fell in love. However, the asking price was above our budget, but the agent told us he could probably negotiate it down for us. We then saw a condominium (private apartments that you rent from the owner in often big complexes with facilities such as out-and/or in-door gym(s), pool(s), tennis/basket ball/squash courts, putting greens, car parks, big gardens, leisure rooms, BBQ pits, guarded gates, convenience stores etc fully serviced by gardeners, cleaners and other care takers) apartment which was a bit on the older side. He also showed us a semi-condo, where both the latter were below our max budget. However, there was no wow-factor there. We returned to the hotel and had a long discussion about what was most important for us regarding accommodation; you really don’t know these things until you see different options and mostly you know straight away if you can consider living in a place once you see it, so we agreed on continuing with all the booked viewings. We also decided we wanted to do all the viewing together, since it’d only be twice as much work if I’d go first alone and then with J again. Therefore it was kind of important to find some place to live before the Wednesday, which was Jonas’ first day at the new office. Since we were quite tired from the move, but also the beer fest (!) we took an early night after making another round at Property Guru’s webpage and were sound asleep at 21.30.
The next few days we met with four other agents and saw 16 apartments, none of them which we were really happy with. We then saw Kendric again and he took us to The Springbloom condominium and Jonas was completely sold.

First pic from The Springbloom of the children water land/pool

I was still hoping for the one with the 2 floors and pool on the roof, but my husband was really convinced. The next day another agent called me and wanted to show me an object just around the corner from our hotel = smack in the middle of Singapore. It was lovely! The Japanese (but of course!) owners had moved to Shanghai for a few years and he was an architect; it was also 2 floors and looked utterly Scandinavian with a lot which reminded of Danish design. I convinced Jonas to come and have a look, since another tenant was coming within the hour to put a down payment on it. Jonas agreed it was a smashing apartment, but became more and more convinced throughout the viewing he really wanted to go for a condominium. We ended up asking to think about it and I left feeling we’d made a terrible mistake. As we had a serious discussion, Kendric called and wanted to meet up for ‘good news’; the owner wanted us to sign a proposal for the really nice penthouse apartment and he also had the papers for Springbloom. We celebrated with having oysters (S$1/oyster…) and nice white wine, served and presented by the owner of a Italian amazing seafood restaurant just by the canal outside our hotel. We then sneaked out to the pool and watched the electric kites flying all over the sky as we were having ice cold beer and dragon fruits.

Oyster nite

Since we by then had stayed at the Robertson Quay Hotel and were a bit fed up with spider web in the ceiling, hotel staff with stains on their clothes and breakfast that sucked ass, we happily took up our friends David and Claudia’s offers about staying at their place. We had dinner together at a rather big pub, which made its own delish beer btw, I got a spare key and hastily relocated with all our stuff to their condominium Dover Park View at Dover Rise the next morning.

Pic from sundeck at Dover Park View

It was really nice to be out of the hotel! I was greeted by a very enthusiastic Golden Retriever named Pringles. During the afternoon I went scouting at IKEA for possible new furniture, had a big plate of Swedish meatballs for the first time in ages and bought herring, hard bread and cheese. Next day was Swedish Midsummer’s eve and we had booked one of the BBQ pits; we grilled everything you can possibly imagine including live crab and drank ice chilled wine until very late. Did I mention David and Claudia are fantastic hosts? They opened their home to us completely and really made us feel so welcome. Bless having good friends; that means everything!

The boyz at the grill, of course, very concentrated