Domestic Goddess Travels: House 21 Waiting To Move In

What is it with living overseas and finding somewhere to live, that is always such a pain in the bum?

After we arrived having looked at different houses in the different locations in Jakarta we decided that we wanted to stay on in the housing complex we are currently staying in with the apartment.

I decided that I would look at the different style housing here and see what would meet our budget. When you view houses they don't really tell you the rental costs until you choose something. What I did was I viewed about ten different houses, some empty and some that would be free in about four six to eight weeks and rated them from my first choice to last choice. Then I had to wait to see what was in our budget. Most where out of our budget being the first price quoted from the complex. Then we had to start negotiating the prices down hoping that one of the houses on the top of our list would be in budget.

Here in Indonesia you also have to consider VAT which is a tax not included in the rental so that always makes the TOTAL cost of rentals quite high.

Other quite common practises here in Indonesia is landlords would rather have a house remain empty then to bring the rent down, empty houses are never maintained until someone decides they will rent the property then and only then will any extra money be spent fixing it up.

We did decide on one house which we could of moved into straight away but the complex wouldn't come to the party in meeting our budget. So it felt like I was back to the drawing board looking again. Another day another couple of viewings. This time a couple of houses that had been vacant for quite a while and in need of some repairs looked promising.

You always ask for items that you want done in the house before signing a contract here because once a contract is signed you never get extra things done. After submitting a five page list of requests which ranged from minor to major items I can say that the decision is made and we have found a house. We have been in the apartment coming up to four weeks now so I am hoping at the longest it will only be another three weeks until we move in to the house. There is so much to do from painting, knocking out a wall, replacing the bathroom and kitchen the finish line seems a long way off. Below are some pictures of the progress so far.