Home, new beginnings

 

Home is where the heart is. That is why you see homes of so many types from steel and glass to plastic sheets and ropes. Homes are emotional to many and is aspirational to some. For a few there is no place like home, no matter how messy, how odd it may seem to another. For some it is a job as they will only build homes that they can never aspire to live in and make do with tin cans on the site.

It has been thirty days to the day we moved in to our own house.  This is not our first house; the first house was intended as a tax saver that has gone not as well as it was planned. Also it was a house that we have never stayed in after a decade of owning it. We wanted a house in the area where we lived for many years now as we found it to be comfortable for a number of reasons but was always outside the budget.

After many home searches where we could not find a suitable one that could tick all the boxes in our wish list at an acceptable price, this house happened. As wise master Oogway said to Po, “there are no accidents”, I will say it was divine providence that I stumbled upon an advertisement a day before the last day of a government housing scheme closed. To cut a long story that was extended by Lockdown 1, we found a house that ticked all the boxes in the same area and just overshot the budget by a little.

So here we are in a new house that we can say we own, though in truth it is owned by the home loan company for some more years. Have things changed from renting to owning? Yes, and No. There are some changes as we don’t need to ask the owner for some things but then when we stay in an apartment complex, other restrictions continue. The owned house is considered an asset but then in today’s context it is a highly illiquid asset. For those who believe in speculation and expecting huge appreciation, in this over heated property markets, new booms are rare. Then why buy a house? We go back to the start of the post where I mentioned a home is an emotional idea. Sometimes we let the heart rule the mind.

So here we are, in the eighth floor of a eleven storey apartment. If you are in the vicinity of the Brand Factory store Annanagar and you happen to see someone in the balcony on the eighth floor of a eleven storey building looking content, you know the house, drop in and we can catch up over good filter coffee that I have learnt to make reasonably well.