Part 1. Hello 92sqm!

It's about time that I should update about my new found social identity as a wife. :')

And here is probably the biggest news of the year, that we are buying a resale flat near Buangkok! It's 4 bustops away from Lnr's place and 5 more stops to le mum. Very soon we will have a cosy lil nest of our own, albeit at the same time it is going to be a significant life commitment, becoming house slaves for the next 25 years maybe? Although of cause who knows maybe we will 飞黄腾达  as well Heheh. Life's full of surprises. Just like how I never expected to get hitched at my sweet and youthful twenty third woohooo~  

As everything in life accumulates, we have come a long way too before reaching our final decision of purchasing the resale flat. Prior to this, we have been outbid twice last year for the Sales of Balance Flats ( SBF, Not widely known, simply put they are unsold units / gave up by bidders during Build to order exercises and got bundled up by HDB for sale again twice a year ). There was more disappointment for the second bidding results because we naively thought that having been registered for marriage, we would definitely be given a 'priority' this time round but guess who got a queue number of 122 out of the 89 available units still Pui. We received the bidding outcome in February and despite the dismay, we still had to decide how to move on from there. So here were the choices? 

1. Wait for the next SBF exercise in May which takes another three months to process. 

2. Fuck it and apply for BTO and wait for another three more years.

3. Get over SBF and explore the resale market. 

To be frank, I personally did not consider number 2 as an option to begin with because it's way too long a wait. There was quite a bit of struggle when we first proposed the idea of Resale to le mum and she had a million and one reasons to refute our suggestion. ( And sidetrack a little I threw a bad tantrum that day over that, left the dining table dramatically and stomped out of the house in tears Oh well. ) Nonetheless after multiple discussions between lnr and I we decided that we will start to look into the resale market and evaluate if there is any suitable units to pick from, or else when may comes perhaps we will go for our third SBF ballot.   

With that plan in mind our search began, and so did many small headaches. 

There were so much so consider given that it's going to cost a huge sum to us, no doubt we want to get the best deal of all and there has been a constant struggle between the long list of 'priorities' and how much are we willing to pay for that 'premium. A long list of deciding factors includes no west facing, near to MRT, convenient transport for lnr, not too low flooring, age and condition of house, the house layout, not beside road, not beside school, not beside carpark and big drop down windows ( Yes this is what I insisted secretly, although we did visited two older flats with small black windows but tbh, really turned off. ) We shortlisted almost 30 'suitable' units and managed to view a total of 9. Considering we are not engaging a buyer agent, we have come across quite a number of seller agents that ignored our enquires completely ( Somehow there are a group of agents aren't keen to deal with buyers directly and we speculate that it's due to the hassle of meeting buyers that complicates the paper works ). We visited most of the available units in the 26x clusters in Compassvale bow and a few 27x (that's nearer to Mrt but more expensive), as well as a few random old flats. In fact we were very close to sealing the deal with another unit but when I contact the agent again for second viewing, the unit was taken already. The resale market is like playing a game, you never know if what you are looking at is the best option available, and you never know when someone else would be a step ahead of you.    

Moving forward lnr and I went to view a unit on 1st March and it turned out pretty satisfying after a number of No-gos prior to that visit, high floor, away from road, school, carpark, yet near to Mrt and Ntuc, partial unblock view, no west facing, and their kitchen was well-maintained. Two days later I brought Le mum down for second viewing ( was pretty nervous bout it, though she soften a lot from her stance of 'go to hell with your resale idea' to ' okay can buy resale but I must approve the flat first' ). And surprise surprise, laoniang was very satisfied with the flat and she helped us to bargain it down to $468k~ YAY! The asking price was $490k but the consensus is that people typically lower by $30k, however just before we went down for second viewing another buyer offered $465k already so we had to up our game. We were so close to losing this unit toooooooo come to think of it :') 

So here is some of the current conditions of the unit that I coped from Property Guru:

From there, we made our deposit for OTP ( Option To Purchase ) of $1000, and exercised the OTP with another deposit of $1000 after the valuation report of the flat was out. For now we have two more HDB appointment to go for before becoming the rightful owners of the unit. :') The first appointment date is tentatively 4th May though we are trying to expedite a little. My best guess is that we will finish the appointments in June, renovate and move in Aug~ :) 

That gives us four more months to go but time is all we need now to plan out every single details because we are very likely engaging just sub-contractors in this whole renovation process. Okay and we need moolah too, lots and lots of moolah.  :/ We have already began our preliminary research and there is more than 100 items in the Taobao Shopping Cart for now while lnr is working on the 3D layout of our nest. I think we still have a lot to work on although I am very prepared that hiccups will happen, let's just keep our fingers crossed that it's not toooooo detrimental to save. I have been trying to keep a renovation diary lately to keep track of things because I'm careless as shit all the time. :') 

Right this post is getting very long, I will leave the renovation brainstorming (It's another pain in a ass, but I'm getting better at it, but it also means I need to move onto the next stage of research, and it will be whole new level of pain. ) to the next post, while I get busy again with all the nitty gritty stuffs.