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The mother of a girl I grew up with works in real estate and she's been helping me out through email. When I get back to New York, she's going to take me looking at a few properties. It's funny. I haven't done this in so long that I'm also a little bit nervous. The way you look at homes in Singapore is very different from the way you look at them in the US. In Singapore, two agents are always present: the owner's agent and the renter's agent. The renter's agent doesn't know the exact location of the property until minutes before taking the renter to see it. Before arriving, the renter's agent has to call the owner's agent and ask for specific directions. This is probably to keep them from going ahead of time and scoping things out. Not really sure why that's such a big deal, but it is to the owners, I guess.
I'm really excited to get into a house. We've been living in what amounts to a shoebox for the past four years. Having some square footage is extremely exciting! I can breakdance in my living room! I can do cartwheels in the kitchen! I can aerobicize in the bedroom! Or, more accurately, I could if I wanted to.
There will be a place to put things. Like food. In Singapore we have to go grocery shopping every few days. There's not a lot of cupboard space and the refrigerators are so small. Our dishes don't really have much of a place to live here either.
And my closet? Oy. It's really tiny. Picture a narrow closet where you might keep your vacuum cleaner and two or three coats. Something just big enough for those few things, but that's about it. That would be my bedroom closet. You could walk in it, sure, but you couldn't turn around. That's what I'm dealing with in Singapore. Most of my clothes get folded and put into a tiny little excuse-for-a-dresser.
The bathrooms here are also very, very small. And the washer and dryer don't fit into the room very well so they are stacked one on top of the other. They aren't supposed to be that way necessarily. I mean, they're not the stackable types, but we really had no choice.
And a yard. It'll be so nice to have a yard again! I do have one friend here who has a pretty good sized piece of property by Singapore standards, but they started building next door and she lost a good bit of her habitat. You see, in the US (depending on where you live) you might see lizards or squirrels living in your back yard. You may occasionally get a deer or even a fox. In Florida, we had lizards, an occasional owl and squirrels galore! But in Singapore, Nikki had monkeys in her back yard. When they started building, though, the monkeys lost some of their trees and they took off to another location with more branches ("real estate" by monkey definition).
I'm looking forward to having neighbors that don't live above me or below me. I'm looking forward to pulling up in a driveway and walking in the front door without having to go up 16 levels in the lift. I'm looking forward to stepping out my front door and seeing trees or grass or a road and not another door that looks just like mine. I'm looking forward to stepping out my front door and smelling food on the grill or fresh air or even dog poop. Not the cigarette smoke from the guy in 16-52. (By the way, Mr Smoker, it's illegal to smoke in the lift lobby.)
Looking for a place to live is more than just a closet to hang my clothes and a place to store my food. It's coming home and I'm really very excited about that!
FYI: If you want to see some of the homes I'm considering, here are the links (in order of preference):
Laurel
Northington
Circle
Deer
Willow
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