For the first time in months, I haven’t written anything for two consecutive days. The only person I would like to pin the blame on – my flat owner. Thanks to them, we are looking for a new place.
Two months ago, our flat lease was close to expiring. When we asked our owner about renewing the rental contract, they demanded a whopping 25% raise on the rent. WHAT THE FUCK.
I don’t have a regular job, the husband wasn’t going to get his annual raise, everybody else in the world was getting either fired or taking a pay-cut or living in anticipation of the same. Amidst all of this, our flat owner wanted us to pay an extra twenty-five-fucking-per-cent. If a pandemic wasn’t plaguing our streets, we would have never considered renewing our contract and would have looked for a new place.
Let me give you some context. The flat we live in is a 2BHK – it has two bedrooms with attached bathrooms, three balconies, a decent sized hall and a very poorly made kitchen. Except for the lights, fans and one broken shelf, the flat did not come with any furniture or appliances. We had to buy everything. Everything. Husband had picked the flat when we were both working in different states. I was supposed to be moving to the same city soon and he had told his current flat-owner that he needed to look to a bigger house because the wife was going to join him.
Let me tell you something – NEVER PICK A FLAT BASED ON ITS PHOTOS. It looked fine to me in pictures, but once we moved in, we realized how poorly designed it was. In Husband’s defense – he didn’t really have the time to look too closely.
Here is what infuriated us the most when the flat owner decided to ask us for an obnoxious extra 25% – the owner is a doctor. It’s not a random rich person who could’ve been ill-informed about the economical hardships most people were facing due to Covid-19. I mean a lot of people do live in their own bubbles, don’t they? We tried to reason with them on keeping the rent the same and after a lot of convincing, they finally settled for a 10% increase and refused to budge. At that point, there was a pretty strict lockdown in our city, with Sunday curfews and other restrictions. House-hunting at such a time would have been a giant pain in the ass. So we sucked up and renewed our lease, but only for 6 months, with a 10% increase.
Now things have relaxed a lot in our city and we gave our flat owner a 30-day notice on the first of this month (September 2020). This meant scouting for new places. So our weekend was burned up in browsing flats and then then going to see them for real. In-fact we saw two really good places, that we bigger, better furnished and the caveat – even cheaper than our current house! The building we live in right now is just a random stand-alone building in a nice area, but with no other facilities, except for a security guard at the entrance. The two flats we really liked were in gated communities with a swimming pool, gym, tennis courts and all the other fancy things that gated communities come with.
All of that still doesn’t change the fact that house-hunting is a pain in the ass. And that just thinking about packing everything and moving again is giving a LOT of anxiety. I mean it’s 4 am in my part of the world and all I can think of is – shifting. And ranting about shifting.
“I think just my kitchen stuff will take up a whole truck!!” I had frantically messaged my close friends last week when I went into my kitchen to get some water.
And my bookshelf! It is a fragile wood shelf that could easily get damaged the moving guys are not careful. The last time we moved, the packers damaged the book-shelf’s glass, but since it was all insured, they replaced the glass and it was as good as new. So these things do happen, it’s not like I am worrying for nothing. I think I am going to try and sleep and not think about the boxes and the trucks.